Possible Types of Textual Data

From the perspective of encoding, it is useful to distinguish between two basic types of textual data:

• Data requiring only one character set

  Data which can be covered by a single code page, such as Western European (Windows 1252), Eastern European (1250) or Arabic (1256). For example English, German, Arabic or some combinations such as German+English or Arabic+English

  -> Single-byte character sets are sufficient for these data

• Data which are not covered by a single code page

  These are either mixed character sets data (German+Arabic, German+Chinese,…) or languages requiring complex character sets (Chinese, Japanese,…)

  -> Unicode encoding required