Multibyte character sets (MBCS)

A multibyte character set defines the encoding for characters on a variable number of bytes. The size of a character can be one (usually ASCII chars), two, three or more bytes, depending on the character set.

Example of multibyte character sets are BIG5, EUC-JP, and UTF-8. BIG5 and EUC-JP characters can be one or two bytes long, while UTF-8 characters can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes long (usually a maximum of 3 is sufficient).

Genero Business Development Language supports multibyte character sets.