SBCS, or Single Byte Character Set, is sometimes used to refer to character sets which use one byte for each graphic character. The term SBCS is commonly used as a contrast against the terms DBCS (double-byte character set) and MBCS (multi-byte character set). Examples of SBCS encodings include ISO/IEC 646, the various ISO 8859 encodings, and the various Microsoft/IBM code pages. Note that the number of bytes used for representing control functions is irrelevant to whether a particular encoding is considered an SBCS or not; in fact, encodings based on ISO 646 frequently employ variable-length multi-byte control sequences, most notably escape sequences. In CJK computing, SBCS’s are traditionally associated with half-width characters, so called because characters in an SBCS paired with a DBCS would traditionally occupy half the width of a DBCS character on a fixed-width computer terminal or text screen.
