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Single-byte and multibyte character sets

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

Note

Many Microsoft run-time library SBCS routines handle multibyte bytes, characters, and strings as appropriate. Many multibyte-character sets define the ASCII character set as a subset. In many multibyte character sets, each character in the range 0x00 - 0x7F is identical to the character that has the same value in the ASCII character set. For example, in both ASCII and MBCS character strings, the one-byte null character ('\0') has value 0x00 and indicates the terminating null character.

A multibyte character set can consist of both 1-byte and 2-byte characters. A multibyte-character string can contain a mixture of single-byte and double-byte characters. A two-byte multibyte character has a lead byte and a trail byte. In a particular multibyte-character set, the lead bytes fall within a certain range, as do the trail bytes. When these ranges overlap, you may need to evaluate the context to determine whether a given byte is functioning as a lead byte or a trail byte.

See also

Internationalization
Universal C runtime routines by category