Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is used as the main part in block compression which has a good balance of speed and compression ratio. Suffix arrays are used in the coding phase of BWT and we focus on creating them for an alphabet larger than 256 symbols. The motivation for this work has been software project XBW-an application for compression of large XML files using word- and syllable-based BWT. The role of BWT is to reorder input before applying other algorithms. We describe and implement three families of algorithms for encoding. Finally we present algorithm by Karkkainen and Sanders for constructing suffix arrays in linear time.