“I only have 2000 letters!” … 2000 including 200 accent characters made it 2200 characters, not 2000.

Or, you could count it in Unicode characters, and not in whatever bizarro charset you're using over there. Then "À" is one character, just as it's supposed to be.

The problem typically comes from improper conversion between charsets. Like Windows-1252 to Unicode, or something equally horrible.