Multibyte Character Set (MBCS): A character set encoded with a variable number of bytes for each character. Many large character sets have been defined as multi-byte character sets in order to keep strict compatibility with the standards of the ASCII subset, the ISO and IEC 2022.

Why is a character set needed?

Each character (such as uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols) must be stored as a unique number called a character code if a computer system is to be able to store and process it.

What is difference between Unicode and multibyte character set?

Unicode is a 16-bit character encoding, providing enough encodings for all languages. All ASCII characters are included in Unicode as widened characters. ... In a particular multibyte-character set, the lead bytes fall within a certain range, as do the trail bytes.