An important aspect of developing applications for international markets is the adequate representation of local character sets. The ASCII character set defines characters in the range 0x00 - 0x7F. There are other character sets, primarily European, that define the characters within the range 0x00 - 0x7F identically to the ASCII character set and also define an extended character set from 0x80 - 0xFF. Thus, an 8-bit, single-byte-character set (SBCS) is sufficient to represent the ASCII character set and the character sets for many European languages. However, some non-European character sets, such as Japanese Kanji, include many more characters than a single-byte coding scheme can represent, and therefore require multibyte-character set (MBCS) encoding.

Unicode and MBCS
Discusses Visual C++ support for Unicode and MBCS programming.

Support for Unicode
Describes Unicode, a specification for supporting all character sets, including character sets that cannot be represented in a single byte.

Support for Multibyte Character Sets (MBCS)
Discusses MBCS, an alternative to Unicode for supporting character sets, like Japanese and Chinese, that cannot be represented in a single byte.

Generic-Text Mappings in tchar.h
Provides Microsoft-specific generic-text mappings for many data types, routines, and other objects.

How to: Convert Between Various String Types
Demonstrates how to convert various Visual C++ string types into other strings.

Internationalization
Discusses international support in the C run-time library.

International Samples
Provides links to samples demonstrating internationalization in Visual C++.

Language and Country/Region Strings
Provides the language and country/region strings in the C run-time library.