A character set is a mapping of characters to their identifying numeric values. Most of the character sets commonly used in computers are single-byte character sets in which each character is identified by a value one byte wide. The large number of characters in Asian languages led to the development of multibyte character sets, in particular the double-byte character set (DBCS). Microsoft® Windows NT® incorporates a new global standard for character encoding: Unicode.
For more information, see the following topics: