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Asked: 2026-05-13T21:40:32+00:00

I used to be confusing quite a while : Confusion on Unicode and Multibyte

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I used to be confusing quite a while :

Confusion on Unicode and Multibyte Articles

After reading up the comments by all contributors, plus :

Looking at an old article (Year 2001) : http://www.hastingsresearch.com/net/04-unicode-limitations.shtml, which talk about unicode :

being a 16-bit character definition
allowing a theoretical total of over
65,000 characters. However, the
complete character sets of the world
add up to over 170,000 characters.

and Looking at current “modern” article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

The most commonly used encodings are
UTF-8 (which uses 1 byte for all
ASCII characters, which have the same
code values as in the standard ASCII
encoding, and up to 4 bytes for other
characters), the now-obsolete UCS-2
(which uses 2 bytes for all
characters, but does not include every
character in the Unicode standard),
and UTF-16 (which extends UCS-2, using
4 bytes to encode characters missing
from UCS-2).

It seems that in the compilation options in VC2008, the options “Unicode” under Character Sets really means “Unicode encoded in UCS-2” (Or UTF-16? I am not sure)

I try to verify this by running the following code under VC2008

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    // Use unicode encoded in UCS-2?
    std::cout << sizeof(L"我爱你") << std::endl;
    // Use unicode encoded in UCS-2?
    std::cout << sizeof(L"abc") << std::endl;
    getchar();

    // Compiled using options Character Set : Use Unicode Character Set.
    // print out 8, 8

    // Compiled using options Character Set : Multi-byte Character Set.
    // print out 8, 8
}

It seems that during compilation with Unicode Character Set options, the outcome matched my assumption.

But what about Multi-byte Character Set? What does Multi-byte Character Set means in current “modern” world? 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-byte_character_set

    MBCS is a term used to denote a class of character encodings with characters that cannot be represented with a single byte, hence multi-byte character set. In order to properly decode a string in this format, you need a codepage that tells you various byte combinations map to characters. ISO/IEC 8859 defines a set of MBCS standards, but according to Wikipedia, ISO stopped maintaining them in 2004, presumably to focus on Unicode.

    So I guess the modern term for MBCS is “deprecated in favor of Unicode”.

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