Text - single-byte character set (SBCS)

About

single-byte character set (SBCS) are character set that can represent a language with one byte (ie a maximum of 256 characters)

Languages written in any of the Western or Middle Eastern alphabets have relatively few characters.

A font character set intended for use with a single-byte code page is called a single-byte character set (SBCS).

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Example

English, for example, has:

• twenty-six uppercase
• twenty-six lowercase letters,
• ten numerals,
• a blank space,
• some punctuation marks,
• and a few special symbols like the ampersand and the plus sign.

All Window codepages can only contain 256 code points. A single byte is large enough to assign a different code point to each character, so a set of code points used for English is called a single-byte code page.