SBCS, or single-byte character set, is used to refer to

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s that use exactly one

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

for each

graphic character In ISO/IEC 646 (commonly known as ASCII) and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character, also known as printing character (or printable character), is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise display ...

. 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 In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

include

ISO/IEC 646 ISO/IEC 646 ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'', is an International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC standard in the ...

, the various

ISO 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...

encodings, and the various

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable character (computing), characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a s ...

s. The term SBCS is commonly contrasted against the terms DBCS (double-byte character set) and TBCS (triple-byte character set), as well as MBCS (multi-byte character set). The multi-byte character sets are used to accommodate languages with scripts that have large numbers of characters and symbols, predominantly Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These are sometimes referred to by the acronym CJK. In these computing systems, SBCSs 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 A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...

or text screen.

In modern times

Though single-byte character sets have largely been supplanted by

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

and its variants on modern systems, they have found a niche in code golfing, where the smaller byte size of characters allows participants to gain an edge if they use SBCSs with specially designed

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s such as Vyxal and GolfScript.

References

Character encoding {{Writingsystem-stub

In modern times

See also

References