Multibyte character code data representation

A multibyte character code is an external representation of data, regardless of whether it is character input from a keyboard or a file on a disk. Within the same code set, the number of bytes that represent the multibyte code of a character can vary. You must use multicultural support functions for character processing to ensure code set independence.

C  = 0x43
*  = 0x81 0x43
*C = 0x81 0x43& 0x43

A program searching for C, not accounting for multibyte characters, finds the second byte of the *C string and assumes it found C when in fact it found the second byte of the * (asterisk) character.