SBCs

Single Byte Character Set (SBCS) is a character encoding in which each character is represented by a single byte. In practice, most SBCSs use 8-bit bytes, although ASCII uses only 7 bits; the high bit is either unused or used for extended characters. An SBCS can represent up to 256 distinct characters, of which the first 128 often align with ASCII, while the remaining 128 are used for additional symbols, diacritics, or letters in various languages.

Many SBCSs are defined as code pages, such as ISO/IEC 8859 family and Windows code pages (125x series). For example ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) covers Western European languages, ISO-8859-5 covers Cyrillic, Windows-1252 is a popular Western European extension. Others include Windows-1251, 1256, 1257, etc.

Advantages: simple, fast encoding and decoding; compact for languages with small alphabets; easy integration with legacy software and hardware.

Limitations: limited to 256 symbols; cannot efficiently encode large character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) without resorting to multi-byte schemes; requires careful handling of code pages and font support; risk of mojibake when mismatched code pages are used; not suitable for multilingual content without switching encodings or using Unicode.

Context: SBCS is contrasted with MBCS (multi-byte character sets) and DBCS (double-byte character sets) used in East Asia. In modern computing, Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16) has largely superseded SBCS for global text interchange.