Dbcs

DBCS

A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character set in which either all characters (including control characters) are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying SBCS is encoded in two bytes (Han characters would generally comprise most of these two-byte characters). A DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols (the maximum number of characters that can be represented with 1 byte is 256 characters, while 2 bytes can represent up to 65,536 characters). Examples of such languages include Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.