Multibyte Character Sets (MBCS): Overview

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Multibyte character sets (MBCS) are an alternative to Unicode for supporting character sets, like Japanese and Chinese, that cannot be represented in a single byte. If you are programming for an international market, consider using either Unicode or MBCS, or enabling your program so you can build it for either by changing a switch.

The most common MBCS implementation is double-byte character sets (DBCS). Visual C++ in general, and MFC in particular, is fully enabled for DBCS.

For samples, see the MFC source code files.

What do you want to know more about?

• What MBCS is

• When to use MBCS

• Support in Visual C++ for MBCS

• The Input Method Editor (IME)

• How to program for MBCS