eight-bit clean

Eight-bit clean describes a computer system that correctly handles 8-bit character sets, such as the ISO 8859 series and the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. Up to the early 1990s, programs and communications systems assumed that all characters would be represented as numbers between 0 and 127 (7 bits), leaving the top bit of each byte free for use as a parity or flag bit. 7-bit systems are unable to handle more complex character codes, which are commonplace in non-English-speaking countries with larger alphabets.
See more at Wikipedia.org...

<software> A term which describes a system that deals correctly with extended character sets which (unlike ASCII) use all eight bits of a byte. Many programs and communications systems assume that all characters have codes in the range 0 to 127. This leaves the top bit of each byte free for use as a parity bit or some kind of flag bit. These assumptions break down when the program is used in some non-english-speaking countries with larger alphabets.
If a binary file is transmitted via a communications link which is not eight-bit clean, it will be corrupted. To combat this you can encode it with uuencode which uses only ASCII characters. There are some links however which are not even "seven-bit clean" and cause problems even for uuencoded data.
(1995-01-05)