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multi-byte character set redirects here, why I put in bold, though MBCS doesn't; directly still do bold it too... [multibyte encoding links here but multibyte elsewhere... and multibyte encodings should likely exist and link here...] |
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{{more citations needed|date=December 2009}}
{{Short description|Type of character encoding scheme}}{{Merge|Variable-length code
| date = February 2025
}}{{About|the storage of text in computers|the transmission of data across noisy channels|variable-length code}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2023}}
A '''variable-width encoding''' is a type of [[character encoding]] scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a [[character set]] (a repertoire of symbols) for representation, usually in a [[computer]].<ref>{{Cite RFC|last=Crispin|first=M.|date=1 April 2005|title=UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode|doi=10.17487/rfc4042|doi-access=}}</ref>{{efn|The concept long precedes the advent of the electronic computer, however, as seen with [[Morse code]].}} Most common variable-width encodings are '''multibyte encodings''' (aka '''MBCS''' – '''multi-byte character set'''), which use varying numbers of [[byte]]s ([[octet (computing)|octets]]) to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in [[Microsoft]] documentation, use the term ''multibyte character set,'' which is a [[misnomer]], because representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.)
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