Which encoding uses 8 bits per character?

Which encoding uses 8 bits per character?

• A. ASCII
• B. EBCDIC
• C. Unicode
• D. UTF-8

Answer: (B)

The key idea is fixed-width encoding: how many bits are used for each character. EBCDIC was designed so every character is represented by exactly one 8-bit code, meaning one byte per character. That makes it uniformly 8 bits per character. In contrast, ASCII originally uses 7 bits per character (though many systems store 8 bits per character, the standard form is 7). Unicode isn’t fixed-width either—its encodings vary: UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes per character, depending on the symbol, so you don’t have a constant 8 bits per character. UTF-8 is based on bytes, but the number of bytes per character can differ. So the option that aligns with 8 bits per character in a straightforward, fixed way is the 8-bit EBCDIC encoding.

The key idea is fixed-width encoding: how many bits are used for each character. EBCDIC was designed so every character is represented by exactly one 8-bit code, meaning one byte per character. That makes it uniformly 8 bits per character.

In contrast, ASCII originally uses 7 bits per character (though many systems store 8 bits per character, the standard form is 7). Unicode isn’t fixed-width either—its encodings vary: UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes per character, depending on the symbol, so you don’t have a constant 8 bits per character. UTF-8 is based on bytes, but the number of bytes per character can differ.

So the option that aligns with 8 bits per character in a straightforward, fixed way is the 8-bit EBCDIC encoding.