With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters (or strictly speaking code points) can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in UTF-8, and other encodings of Unicode use two or four bytes per code point.
The need for wide characters arises due to the internationalization of computer software, which necessitates handling text from various languages. Unicode characters (or their numerical representations) can be one, two, three, or four bytes long in UTF-8 encoding, and other encodings use two or four bytes per character.