Home | Unicode Tasks | Multibyte Character Set (MBCS) Tasks
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 can be represented in a single-byte coding scheme, and therefore require multibyte-character set (MBCS) encoding.
This family of articles describes the Visual C++ support for extended character sets, and focuses on writing portable code that can be built for several different character sets.