Search notes:

Character set

A character set is a collection of characters without any glyphs associated with it.
Each character of a character set has a unique (within the character set) character code (codepoint). For example, in ASCII (which is a character set), 65 represents an A

Single Byte Character Sets (SBCS)

Each character corresponds to a single byte character code.
Examples: ASCII
SBCS are mostly found in American and European countries.

Double Byte Character Sets (DBCS)

Each character corresponds to exactly a two byte character code. This implies a maximum of 65'536 Unicode Character
UTF-16 is not a DBCS because it also encodes some characters with four bytes and is therefore an MBCS

Multibyte Character Sets (MBCS)

Dependent on a character, varying number of bytes is used.
Examples: utf-8, utf-16, utf-7, Shift-JIS, GB2312

See also

collation
ISO 8859
Specifying a characterset within an HTML document
locale
The registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Charset.
The Oracle function utl_i18n.string_to_raw converts an Oracle PL/SQL string to a given character set (and returns its binary data).
The function utl_raw.convert converts strings (or more accurately RAWs) between two character sets.

Index