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<h2 class="chapter">6 Character Set Handling</h2>

<p>Character sets used in the early days of computing had only six, seven,
or eight bits for each character: there was never a case where more than
eight bits (one byte) were used to represent a single character.  The
limitations of this approach became more apparent as more people
grappled with non-Roman character sets, where not all the characters
that make up a language's character set can be represented by 2^8
choices.  This chapter shows the functionality that was added to the C
library to support multiple character sets.

<ul class="menu">
<li><a accesskey="1" href="Extended-Char-Intro.html#Extended-Char-Intro">Extended Char Intro</a>:               Introduction to Extended Characters. 
<li><a accesskey="2" href="Charset-Function-Overview.html#Charset-Function-Overview">Charset Function Overview</a>:         Overview about Character Handling
                                      Functions. 
<li><a accesskey="3" href="Restartable-multibyte-conversion.html#Restartable-multibyte-conversion">Restartable multibyte conversion</a>:  Restartable multibyte conversion
                                      Functions. 
<li><a accesskey="4" href="Non_002dreentrant-Conversion.html#Non_002dreentrant-Conversion">Non-reentrant Conversion</a>:          Non-reentrant Conversion Function. 
<li><a accesskey="5" href="Generic-Charset-Conversion.html#Generic-Charset-Conversion">Generic Charset Conversion</a>:        Generic Charset Conversion. 
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