A term which describes a system that deals correctly wITh extended character sets which (unlike ASCII) use all eight bITs of a byte. Many programs and communications systems assume that all characters have codes in the range 0 to 127. This leaves the top bIT of each byte free for use as a parITy bIT or some kind of flag bIT. These assumptions break down when the program is used in some non-english-speaking countries wITh larger alphabets. If a binary file is transmITted via a communications link which is not eight-bIT clean, IT will be corrupted. To combat this you can encode IT wITh uuencode which uses only ASCII characters. There are some links however which are not even "seven-bIT clean" and cause problems even for uuencoded data. (1995-01-05)