Stateless Encodings

Stateless code sets are those that can be classified as one of two types:

• Single-byte code sets, such as the ISO8859 family

• Multibyte code sets, such as PC codes for Japanese and Shift-JIS (SJIS)

The term multibyte code sets is also used to refer to any code set that needs one or more bytes to encode a character; multibyte code sets are considered stateless.

Conversions are meaningful only if the code sets represent the same character set.