SBCS, or Single Byte Character Set, is used to refer to character sets which use exactly one byte for each graphic character. SBCS can accommodate a maximum of 256 symbols, and were originally essentially built for the English language because English does not have many symbols or accented letters. Examples of SBCS encodings include ISO/IEC 646, the various ISO 8859 encodings, and the various Microsoft/IBM code pages.
The term SBCS is commonly contrasted against the terms DBCS (double-byte character set) and MBCS (multi-byte character set). The multi-byte character sets are used to accommodate languages with more characters and symbols than English and other predominantly European languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These are sometimes referred to to by the acronym CJK. In these computing systems, SBCS’s are traditionally associated with half-width characters, so-called because such SBCS characters would traditionally occupy half the width of a DBCS character on a fixed-width computer terminal or text screen.
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