Editing Wide character (section)

==Relation to multibyte characters==
Just as earlier data transmission systems suffered from the lack of an [[8-bit clean]] data path, modern transmission systems often lack support for 16-bit or 32-bit data paths for character data.  This has led to character encoding systems such as [[UTF-8]] that can use [[variable-width encoding|multiple bytes]] to encode a value that is too large for a single 8-bit symbol.

The [[C (programming language)|C]] standard distinguishes between ''multibyte'' encodings of characters, which use a fixed or variable number of bytes to represent each character (primarily used in source code and external files), from ''wide characters'', which are [[Run time (program lifecycle phase)|run-time]] representations of characters in single objects (typically, greater than 8 bits).