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).
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.
MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Set)
is used as a synonym
for DBCS.