Multibyte Support Environment (MSE)

A multibyte character is a character that cannot be stored in a single byte, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters. These characters require two or three bytes of storage. A more precise definition can be found in ISO/IEC 9899:1990 subclause 3.13. The programming model enables these multibyte characters to be read in as logical units and stored internally as wide characters. These wide characters can be processed by the program as logical entities in their own right. Finally, these wide characters can be written out (undergoing appropriate translation) as logical units. This is analogous to the way single-byte characters are read in, manipulated, and written out again. The MSE provides a comparable set of interfaces to perform this processing. The MSE allows programs to be written to handle multibyte characters using the same programming model that is used for single-byte characters.