Encoding for NLS

Character Sets for Encoding in NLS

Encodings are available to address the requirements of the character set (few languages use the same 26 characters, A through Z as English). All languages are represented using either of the following classes of character sets:

SBCS (Single-Byte Character Set)

represents each character in a single (one) byte. A single-byte character set can be either 7 bits (providing up to 128 characters) or 8 bits (providing up to 256 characters). An example of an 8-bit SBCS is the ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic) character set (represents the Russian characters).

For details about how SAS uses SBCS encodings, see Encoding Values in SAS Language Elements.

DBCS (Double-Byte Character Set)

refers to the East Asian character sets (Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese), which require a mixed-width encoding because most characters consist of more than one byte. Although the term DBCS (Double-Byte Character Set) is more commonly used than MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Set), MBCS is more accurate. Some, but not all characters in an East Asian character set do require more than one byte.

For details about how SAS uses DBCS encodings, see SAS System Options for Processing DBCS Data.

MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Set)

is used as a synonym for DBCS.

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