How many characters can a comment to a post have on Facebook? Note that I'm not referring to a status update or a root post in a group but to the comments.
5 Answers
Great question, though there doesn't appear to be any definitive answer. I think @1kenthomas 's answer is better than the accepted one, as there was (presumably) an attempt to obtain empirical evidence.
So, I've done a series of manual tests as of a few minutes ago, and the result was exactly 7,897 characters was the limit. Even one character more causes Facebook to reject it.
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2On closer inspection, it appears that when editing comments this limit is not enforced, so if you simply edit the comment you can type as much as you want!
:D
– JimbaliNov 11, 2015 at 2:13 -
1Haha! Brilliant - added to the manual test above and it seems work. Great hack! :) Nov 11, 2015 at 8:58
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1THANK YOU, @Magicode! Your "edit" trick worked for my 8,137 character reply comment!– RyanAug 18, 2017 at 15:40
At the moment (07/11/2015) the limit is 8000 bytes. Thus, if you have a single paragraph, with no non-ASCII characters, the limit is 8000 characters. Else, it depends on the characters you are using and the number of paragraphs and so forth.
I can’t find an official source, but according to this website, the size of a Facebook comment is unlimited.
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i often get an error when it's too long, and then manage to post the comment if i make it shorter. i doubt it's unlimited. Oct 22, 2015 at 8:03
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From some trial and error, the limit appears to (currently) be 8000. However, this is not the number of characters, but rather the number of bytes it takes to represent the string in UTF-8. Also note that each line break counts as 2 bytes (presumably \r\n).
So if you have a string of just the character 'a' repeated, you'll be able to fit 8000 chars, if you have 1 line break you'll only fit 7999. If you want to support non-ASCII characters then you need to actually calculate the number of bytes (each character can take up to 4 bytes to store), so the actual number of characters you can fit will vary.
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1Is it your own calculations or do you have any officially link about this? Sep 18, 2015 at 9:54
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I couldn't find any official documentation for this, so I came to this conclusion myself through some trial and error.– J KeeganSep 19, 2015 at 11:54
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1On top of that the amount of newlines is limited - you can have up to 100 newlines in your comment. It's something that I've found myself by manual testing, the API doesn't return a meaningful error in such case. Aug 24, 2022 at 9:40
This is response I got from Facebook API. So the limit is exactly 8,000 officially.
{
"message" : "An unknown error occurred",
"type" : "OAuthException",
"code" : 1,
"error_subcode" : 1446011,
"is_transient" : false,
"error_user_title" : "Comment Text Too Long",
"error_user_msg" : "Sorry, comments cannot be longer than 8,000 characters.",
"fbtrace_id" : "Ap6K4QzrwsP"
}
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1
I'm able to post about 1 page-- about just under 2000 characters. 3000 fails at the moment.