In computing, Chinese character encodings can be used to represent text written in the CJK languages — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — and (rarely) Vietnamese, all of which use Chinese characters. Several general-purpose character encodings accommodate Chinese characters, and some of them were developed specifically for Chinese. CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which comprise the main East Asian languages. ... 漢字 hànzì, hanja, kanji… in Traditional Chinese and other languages. ... A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a set of characters (representations of graphemes or grapheme-like units, such as might appear in an alphabet or syllabary for the communication of a natural language) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses, in order...

The following are common Chinese character encoding systems:

• Guobiao is used in Mainland China. All Guobiao standards are prefixed by GB, the latest version is GB18030 which is a one, two or four byte encoding.
• Big5, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, is a one or two byte encoding.
• Unicode.

Guobiao is usually displayed using simplified characters and Big5 is usually displayed using traditional characters. There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system and the font used to display the characters; font and encoding are usually tied together for practical reasons. Guobiao code is a collective term of the national standard encoding of the Peoples Republic of China. ... The highlighted area in the map is what is commonly known as mainland China. Mainland China (Simplified Chinese: 中国大陆; Traditional Chinese: 中國大陸; Hanyu Pinyin: , lit. ... GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ... A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ... Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan (Republic of China) and Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiǎntǐzì; also called 简化字/簡化字, jiǎnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. ... Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. ...

The conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese is usually problematic, because the simplification involves mapping many characters with different meaning and usage into a much simpler common writing. The traditional to simplified (many-to-one) conversion is technically simple. The opposite conversion often results in a data loss when converting to early forms of the GB character set (namely GB2312 80): in mapping one-to-many when assigning traditional glyphs to the simplified glyphs, some characters will inevitably be the wrong choices in some of the usages. Thus simplified to traditional conversion often requires usage context or common phrases to resolve conflicts. This issue is less of a problem with newer standards such as GB18030 and Unicode which have separate code points for both simplified and traditional characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China. ... GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

One other issue is that many of the encoding systems are missing characters. While the missing characters are often literary and not commonly used in ordinary text, this does become a problem because people's names often contain these characters. An example of the problem is the Taiwanese politician Wang Jian-Hsuan whose second given name is not in some character systems. But the newest GB standard, GB18030 has the complete character repertoire of Unicode 4.0, including the Unihan extensions in the Supplementary Ideographic Plane. The location of Taiwan Taiwan is mostly mountainous in the east but gradually changes to gently sloping plains in the west. ... Wang Chien-shien (王建煊 Pinyin: Wáng Jiànxuān) (born August 7, 1938) is a founder of the New Party. ... GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ... Han unification is the process used by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. ... Unicode reserves 1,114,112 (= 220 + 216) code points, and currently assigns characters to more than 96,000 of those code points. ...

The issue of which encoding to use can also have political implications, as GB is the official standard of the People's Republic of China and Big5 is a de facto standard of Taiwan. De facto is a Latin expression that means in fact or in practice. It is commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning by law) when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as created or developed without...

In contrast to the situation with Japanese, there has been relatively little overt opposition to Unicode, which solves many of the issues involved with GB and Big5. Unicode is widely regarded as politically neutral, has good support for both simplified and traditional characters, and can be easily converted to and from the GB and Big5. Furthermore Unicode has the advantage of not being limited only to Chinese, since it can also display many other character sets. Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

See also

• Chinese input methods for computers
• Han unification
• Four corner method

The Chinese language uses a logographic script—one in which one character corresponds roughly to one word or meaning—there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard. ... Han unification is the process used by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. ... The four corner method (四角號碼檢字法) is a method of encoding Chinese characters using four numerical digits per character (in some situations, an additional digit is used). ...

External links

• Chinese Encoding Converter Covert between GB, Big5, Unicode.
• Character encoding in Windows