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Character Sets in C++

An important aspect of developing applications for international markets is the adequate representation of local character sets. The ASCII character set defines characters in the range 0x00 to 0x7F. There are other character sets, primarily European, that define the characters within the range 0x00 to 0x7F identically to the ASCII character set and also define an extended character set from 0x80 to 0xFF. Thus, an 8-bit, single-byte-character set (SBCS) is sufficient to represent the ASCII character set, as well as the character sets for many European languages. However, some non-European character sets, such as Japanese Kanji, include many more characters than a single-byte coding scheme can represent, and therefore require multibyte-character set (MBCS) encoding.

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