
Cart Checkout Return to Tiny.cloud

Limit number of characters/words

Contribute to this page

It seems fairly common that people want to limit the number of words/characters in a form with TinyMCE so here is a small code snippet that can be used in your implementation logic to count the number of characters in the text and the number of words. The character/word limit checking needs to be in the implementation logic since TinyMCE shouldn't mess with form submission or validation that is up to the implementation.

Function that returns text statistics for an editor instance by id

// Returns text statistics for the specified editor by id
function getStats(id) {
    var body = tinymce.get(id).getBody(), text = tinymce.trim(body.innerText || body.textContent);

    return {
        chars: text.length,
        words: text.split(/[\w\u2019\'-]+/).length

Example of usage of the statistics function above

function submitForm() {
    // Check if the user has entered less than 1000 characters
    if (getStats('content').chars < 1000) {
        alert("You need to enter 1000 characters or more.");

    // Check if the user has entered less than 100 words
    if (getStats('content').words < 100) {
        alert("You need to enter 100 words or more.");

    // Submit the form

Example on how to visually preview the contents entered in a size restrictive box.
