History of GB Character Sets

This section provides a quick introduction of GB character sets: GB2312-1980, GB1300.1 and GB18030-2000.

GB: An abbreviation of Guojia Biaozhun, or Guo Biao, meaning "national standard" in Chinese.

GB2312-1980: A coded character set and encoding scheme established by the government of People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1980. GB2312-1980 contains 7445 characters, including 6763 Hanzi and 682 non-Hanzi characters.

GB1300.1: A coded character set and encoding scheme established by the government of PRC in 1993 for Hanzi characters. GB1300.1 is designed to be compatible with Unicode 2.1 by maintaining all characters in GB2312-1980 untouched, and positioning all additional characters defined in the Unified Han portion of Unicode 2.1 around the GB2312-1980 character set. GB1300.1 is also called Guojia Biaozhun Kuozhan (GBK). It defines 23940 code points containing 21886 characters.

GB18030-2000: A coded character set and encoding scheme established by PRC as an update of GB1300.1 to be compatible with Unicode 3.0. GB18030-2000 has 1.6 million valid code points, 0.5 million more than Unicode 3.0.

The government of PRC has required, since September 1, 2001, that all operating systems on non-handheld computers sold in PRC must comply with the GB18030-2000 standard.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Character Sets and Encodings

 ASCII Character Set and Encoding

 GB2312 Character Set and Encoding

GB18030 Character Set and Encoding

History of GB Character Sets

 GB18030 Encoding for GB18030 Character Set

 JIS X0208 Character Set and Encodings

 Unicode Character Set

 UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-Bit)

 UTF-16, UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE Encodings

 UTF-32, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE Encodings

 Python Language and Unicode Characters

 Java Language and Unicode Characters

 Character Encoding in Java

 Character Set Encoding Maps

 Encoding Conversion Programs for Encoded Text Files

 Using Notepad as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Word as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Excel as a Unicode Text Editor

 Unicode Fonts

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB