A character whose character code consists of two or more bytes under a certain character encoding scheme. Note that the same character may have different character codes under different encoding schemes. Oracle cannot tell whether a character is a multibyte character without knowing which character encoding scheme is being used. For example, Japanese Hankaku-Katakana (half-width Katakana) characters are one byte in the JA16SJIS encoded character set, two bytes in JA16EUC, and three bytes in UTF8.