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Internationalisation - Code Sets
The variety of code sets in use today presents a significant challenge to the developer wanting to internationalise a software application. Even variants of the same language may require different code sets. For example, DOS users in Canada use code page 863, while in France the standard code page is 850.

Code sets are not only language-dependent, they are platform-specific. For instance, any given language's code set for Windows is different than the same language's set for Macintosh.

Some languages, namely Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, use character sets so large that the entries cannot be represented by a single-byte code set. An encoding method using several bytes must be employed in order to accommodate the more than 12,000 characters, or ideograms, used by some languages.

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