A mixture of single-byte characters from a single-byte character set and double-byte characters from a double-byte character set. See single-byte character set, double-byte character set.
A multibyte character is a character that takes up several buffer positions. Emacs uses multibyte characters to represent non-ASCII text, since the number of non-ASCII characters is much more than 256. See section Introduction to International Character Sets.
(n.) A character whose codepoint is stored in 1 or more bytes. It differs from wide-character encoding in that the number of bytes representing a character can vary.
A character whose character code consists of two or more bytes under a certain character encoding scheme. Note that the same character may have different character codes under different encoding schemes. Oracle cannot tell whether a character is a multibyte character without knowing which character encoding scheme is being used. For example, Japanese Hankaku-Katakana (half-width Katakana) characters are one byte in the JA16SJIS encoded character set, two bytes in JA16EUC, and three bytes in UTF8. See also single-byte character.
A multibyte character is a character that takes up several bytes in a buffer. Emacs uses multibyte characters to represent non-ASCII text, since the number of non-ASCII characters is much more than 256. See section International Characters.
A coded character that can be represented in one or more bytes. Multibyte data streams can include characters with varying widths, and can therefore make extensive text processing of individual characters a challenge. See "Wide Characters".
a sequence consisting of one or more bytes that is used to represent members of an extended character set. For example, 2 bytes are needed to represent the basic set of 14,000 Kanji ideographs, in contrast to the 256 EBCDIC characters that can all be represented by 1 byte. See also double-byte character set (DBCS).
