Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
Well, DBCS means "double byte character set" and thus it is always two
bytes. But its a theoretical definition since there are no actual DBCS
code pages -- all of the ones that exist are MBCS (multibyte character
set) since they support both one-byte and two-byte characters.
More or less. There are systems that use pure DBCS, for example in databases, to get a fixed-width
encoding. Usually those DBCS codepages are the double-byte portions of some MBCS codepages though.
There are standards like the Chinese GB18030 which supports characters
of 1, 2, or 4 bytes -- definitely MBCS again.
Other examples: There are EUC-JP (1/2/3 bytes per character) and EUC-CN (1/2/4 BpC) which are quite
"old" (much older than GB 18030).
But these code pages are generally owned by outside
governments/agencies, so there is no rule that they need to update
when Unicode does.
Right. No one codepage _has_ to be upgraded just because another one is.
markus
--
Opinions expressed here may not reflect my company's positions unless otherwise noted.
