In some cases, converting data between the server’s character set and the client’s character set results in a change to the length of the data. For example, this occurs when the character set on one system uses one byte to represent each character and the character set on the other system requires two bytes per character.
When character set conversion results in a change in data length, there are two possibilities:
The data length decreases, as in the following examples:
Greek or Russian in multibyte UTF-8 to a single-byte Greek or Russian character set
Japanese two-byte Hankaku Katakana characters in EUC-JIS to single-byte characters in Shift-JIS
The data length increases, as in the following examples:
Single-byte Thai to multibyte Thai in UTF-8
Single-byte Japanese characters in Shift-JIS to two-byte Hankaku Katakana in EUC-JIS
