Single-byte code pages can accommodate a maximum of 256 characters. This presents a problem for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, whose ideographic and syllabic writing systems each contain tens of thousands of characters. This also presents a problem for Unicode, a standard that defines a code page to accommodate all characters of all languages of the world—including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
This chapter discusses a solution—multi-byte code pages—focusing on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and also touches on Unicode. For more information on Unicode, see
Using Unicode.
