Meaning – A double-butte character set, or DBCS, is a type of encoding in which the characters are encoded into two bytes. Either all the characters are encoded at once, or merely the graphic characters, that cannot be represented by an accompanying single-byte character set (SBCS) is encoded in two bytes.
A double-byte character set is used when the native language contains many special characters, like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
It is interesting to note that the maximum number of characters that can be represented with one byte is 256 characters, while two bytes can represent up to 65,536 characters.
An easy way to understand a double byte character septum, is that while each letter of the alphabet occupies a single byte in the computer memory, the CJK (Chinese Japanese, Korean) languages are syllabic languages and each syllable occupies two bytes in computer memory.
Example of usage – “The developer had to be well versed with the concept of a double byte character set, as he was using a CJK language set for his work.”
