Variable-width encoding

A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set (a repertoire of symbols) for representation in a computer. Most common variable-width encodings are multibyte encodings, which use varying numbers of bytes (octets) to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term multibyte character set, which is a misnomer, because representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.)

Early variable width encodings using less than a byte per character were sometimes used to pack English text into fewer bytes in adventure games for early microcomputers. However disks (which unlike tapes allowed random access allowing text to be loaded on demand), increases in computer memory and general purpose compression algorithms have rendered such tricks largely obsolete.

Multibyte encodings are usually the result of a need to increase the number of characters which can be encoded without breaking backward compatibility with an existing constraint. For example, with one byte (8 bits) per character, one can encode 256 possible characters; in order to encode more than 256 characters, the obvious choice would be to use two or more bytes per encoding unit, two bytes (16 bits) would allow 65,536 possible characters, but such a change would break compatibility with existing systems and therefore might not be feasible at all.

Since the aim of a multibyte encoding system is to minimise changes to existing application software, some characters must retain their pre-existing single-unit codes, even while other characters have multiple units in their codes. The result is that there are three sorts of units in a variable-width encoding: singletons, which consist of a single unit, lead units, which come first in a multiunit sequence, and trail units, which come afterwards in a multiunit sequence. Input and display software obviously needs to know about the structure of the multibyte encoding scheme but other software generally doesn't need to know if a pair of bytes represent two separate characters or just one character.

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