What is a multibyte character set?

Question

Does the term multibyte refer to a charset whose characters can - but don\'t have to be - wider than 1 byte, (e.g. UTF-8) or does it refer to character sets which are in any

Answer 1

A multibyte character will mean a character whose encoding requires more than 1 byte. This does not imply however that all characters using that particular encoding will have the same width (in terms of bytes). E.g: UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded character may use multiple bytes sometimes whereas all UTF-32 encoded characters always use 32-bits.

References:

• IBM: Multibyte Characters
• Unicode and MultiByte Character Set
• Unicode Consortium Website