többbájtos

Többbájtos is a term originating from Hungarian that literally translates to "multi-byte". It is most commonly used in computing to refer to characters or data that require more than one byte of storage. This contrasts with single-byte characters, which can be represented within a single byte of memory.

The need for multi-byte characters arose with the expansion of character sets beyond the limitations of ASCII. ASCII, a 7-bit encoding, could only represent 128 characters, primarily English letters, numbers, and basic punctuation. To accommodate a wider range of languages with different alphabets, accents, and symbols, extended character sets were developed. Many of these extended sets, and indeed most modern character encodings like UTF-8, utilize multi-byte sequences to represent a vast array of characters from virtually all writing systems.

In practice, többbájtos characters are prevalent in internationalized applications and documents. When dealing with text in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even many European languages with diacritical marks, the underlying data often consists of multi-byte sequences. Software applications and operating systems must be designed to correctly interpret and process these multi-byte strings to display and manipulate text accurately. Failure to handle többbájtos characters properly can lead to display errors, corrupted text, or application crashes.