Variable-width encoding

A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set (a repertoire of symbols) for representation in a computer. Most common variable-width encodings are multibyte encodings, which use varying numbers of bytes (octets) to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term multibyte character set, which is a misnomer since representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.)
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