Variable-width encoding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:52, 27 December 2007

Revision as of 01:22, 31 December 2007

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(Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term ''multibyte character set,'' which is a [[misnomer]] since representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.)

Early variable width encodings using less than a byte per character were sometimes used to pack English text into lessfewer bytes in [[adventure game]]s for early [[microcomputers]]. However [[disk storage|disk]]s (which unlike tapes allowed random access allowing text to be loaded on demand), increases in computer memory and general purpose [[compression algorithm]]s have rendered such tricks largely redundant.

Multibyte encodings are usually the result of a need to increase the number of characters which can be encoded without breaking [[backward compatibility]] with an existing constraint. For example, with one byte (8 bits) per character, one can encode 256 possible characters; in order to encode more than 256 characters, the obvious choice would be to use two or more bytes per encoding unit, two bytes (16 bits) would allow 65,536 possible characters, but such a change would break compatibility with existing systems and therefore might not be feasible at all.