SBCS, orsingle-byte character set, is used to refer tocharacter encodings that use exactly onebyte for eachgraphic character. 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 SBCSencodings includeISO/IEC 646, the variousISO 8859 encodings, and the variousMicrosoft/IBMcode pages.^[1][2]

The term SBCS is commonly contrasted against the termsDBCS (double-byte character set) andTBCS (triple-byte character set), as well asMBCS (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 acronymCJK. In these computing systems, SBCSs are traditionally associated withhalf-width characters, so-called because such SBCS characters would traditionally occupy half the width of a DBCS character on a fixed-widthcomputer terminal ortext screen.

Though single-byte character sets have largely been supplanted byUTF-8 and its variants on modern systems,^[3] they have found a niche incode golfing, where the smaller byte size of characters allows participants to gain an edge if they use SBCSs with specially-designedprogramming languages such asVyxal^[4] andGolfScript.

• DBCS
• TBCS
• MBCS
• Variable-width encoding

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