SBCS, or Single Byte Character Set, is used to refer to character sets which use exactly one byte

Byte

The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...

 for each graphic character

Graphic character

In ISO/IEC 646 and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise displayed in a form that can be read by humans...

. SBCS can accommodate a maximum of 256 symbols, and were originally essentially built for the English language because English does not have many symbols or accented letters. Examples of SBCS encodings

Character encoding

A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

 include ISO/IEC 646

ISO/IEC 646

ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO standard that since its first edition in 1972 has specified a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived...

, the various ISO 8859 encodings, and the various Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

/IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 code page

Code page

Code page is another term for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language. The term code page originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems, but many vendors use this term including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Corporation...

s.

The term SBCS is commonly contrasted against the terms DBCS

DBCS

A double-byte character set is a character set that represents each character with 2 bytes. The DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols...

 (double-byte character set) and MBCS (multi-byte character set). The multi-byte character sets are used to accommodate languages with more characters and symbols than English and other predominantly European languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These are sometimes referred to to by the acronym CJK

CJK

CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which is used in the field of software and communications internationalization.The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese, which constitute the main East Asian languages.- Characteristics :...

. In these computing systems, SBCS’s are traditionally associated with half-width characters, so-called because such SBCS characters would traditionally occupy half the width of a DBCS character on a fixed-width computer terminal

Computer terminal

A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...

 or text screen

Text mode

Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...

.

See also

• DBCS
  DBCS
  A double-byte character set is a character set that represents each character with 2 bytes. The DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols...
  
  
• MBCS
• Variable-width encoding
  Variable-width encoding
  A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set for representation in a computer...