A DBCS , Double Byte Character Set, is an encoding in which characters are encoded in two bytes.
DBCS may also refer to:
UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from UnicodeTransformation Format – 8-bit.
UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding, now known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), once it became clear that more than 216 (65,536) code points were needed.
Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for Traditional Chinese characters.
In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte.
In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in sequences of 24 bits that can be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits.
A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character encoding in which either all characters are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying single-byte character set (SBCS) is encoded in two bytes. A DBCS supports national languages that contain many unique characters or symbols. Examples of such languages include Japanese and Chinese. Korean Hangul does not contain as many characters, but KS X 1001 supports both Hangul and Hanja, and uses two bytes per character.
ISO/IEC 2022Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques, is an ISO standard in the field of character encoding. Originating in 1971, it was most recently revised in 1994.
Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese.
A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set for representation, usually in a computer. Most common variable-width encodings are multibyte encodings, which use varying numbers of bytes (octets) to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term multibyte character set, which is a misnomer, because representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.)
UTF-EBCDIC is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to five one-byte (8-bit) code units. It is meant to be EBCDIC-friendly, so that legacy EBCDIC applications on mainframes may process the characters without much difficulty. Its advantages for existing EBCDIC-based systems are similar to UTF-8's advantages for existing ASCII-based systems. Details on UTF-EBCDIC are defined in Unicode Technical Report #16.
CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows for storage of additional information on a standards-compliant audio CD.
A CCSID is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32, but which may or may not actually be accompanied by a CCSID number to indicate that this encoding is being used.
SBCS, or Single Byte Character Set, is used to refer to character encodings that use exactly one byte for each graphic character. An SBCS can accommodate a maximum of 256 symbols, and is useful for scripts that do not have many symbols or accented letters such as the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts used mainly for European languages. Examples of SBCS encodings include ISO/IEC 646, the various ISO 8859 encodings, and the various Microsoft/IBM code pages.
IBM code page 932 is one of IBM's extensions of Shift JIS. The coded character sets are JIS X 0201:1976, JIS X 0208:1983, IBM extensions and IBM extensions for IBM 1880 UDC. It is the combination of the single-byte Code page 897 and the double-byte Code page 301. Code page 301 is designed to encode the same repertoire as IBM Japanese DBCS-Host.
Unified Hangul Code (UHC), or Extended Wansung, also known under Microsoft Windows as Code Page 949, is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Korean language. It is an extension of Wansung Code to include all 11172 non-partial Hangul syllables present in Johab. This corresponds to the pre-composed syllables available in Unicode 2.0 and later.
In CJK computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth and halfwidth characters. Unlike monospaced fonts, a halfwidth character occupies half the width of a fullwidth character, hence the name.
Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls. Using the UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs. Nevertheless, Microsoft failed to support UTF-8 until 2017. In Windows 11 some system files are required to use UTF-8.
Microsoft Windows code page 932, also called Windows-31J amongst other names, is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Japanese language, which is an extended variant of the Shift JIS Japanese character encoding. It contains standard 7-bit ASCII codes, and Japanese characters are indicated by the high bit of the first byte being set to 1. Some code points in this page require a second byte, so characters use either 8 or 16 bits for encoding.
IBM code page 949 (IBM-949) is a character encoding which has been used by IBM to represent Korean language text on computers. It is a variable-width encoding which represents the characters from the Wansung code defined by the South Korean standard KS X 1001 in a format compatible with EUC-KR, but adds IBM extensions for additional hanja, additional precomposed Hangul syllables, and user-defined characters.
Several mutually incompatible versions of the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) have been used to represent the Japanese language on computers, including variants defined by Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM and others. Some are variable-width encodings, employing locking shift codes to switch between single-byte and double-byte modes. Unlike other EBCDIC locales, the lowercase basic Latin letters are often not preserved in their usual locations.