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.
