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Character Sets
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The Western editions (including English, French, and German) of Windows use the ANSI Latin-1 (1252) character set. However, other editions of Windows use different character sets. For example, the Japanese version of Windows uses the Shift-JIS character set (code page 932), which represents Japanese characters as multibyte character codes.

There are generally three types of characters sets:

- Single-byte
- Multibyte
- Wide characters

Windows and Linux both support single-byte and multibyte character sets as well as Unicode. With a single-byte character set, each byte in a string represents one character. The ANSI character set used by many western operating systems is a single-byte character set.

In a multibyte character set, some characters are represented by one byte and others by more than one byte. The first byte of a multibyte character is called the lead byte. In general, the lower 128 characters of a multibyte character set map to the 7-bit ASCII characters, and any byte whose ordinal value is greater than 127 is the lead byte of a multibyte character. Only single-byte characters can contain the null value (#0). Multibyte character sets—especially double-byte character sets (DBCS)—are widely used for Asian languages.

See Also

OEM and ANSI Character Sets

Multibyte Character Sets

Locale-specific Features

Wide Characters

Unicode in RAD Studio

Enabling Unicode in Your Applications

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