GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This character set is formally called "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology -- Chinese ideograms coded character set for information interchange -- Extension for the basic set". GB abbreviates Guojia Biaozhun (国家标准), which means national standard in Chinese. The standard was published by the China Standard Press, Beijing, March 17, 2000 and updated November 20, 2000. As of September 1, 2001, support for this character set is officially mandatory for all software products sold in the PRC. Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ... This page compares Unicode encodings. ... UTF-7 (7-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding that was proposed for representing Unicode-encoded text using a stream of ASCII characters, for example for use in Internet e-mail messages. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... CESU-8 is a variant of UTF-8 that is described in Unicode Technical Report 26. ... In computing, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are the names of two nearly identical 16-bit Unicode Transformation Formats: character encoding forms that provide a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or... UTF-32 and UCS-4 are alternate names for a method of encoding Unicode characters, using the fixed amount of exactly 32 bits for each Unicode code point. ... UTF-EBCDIC is an encoding of Unicode that is meant to be EBCDIC friendly so that some older EBCDIC applications can handle some Unicode data. ... The Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode (SCSU) is a Unicode Technical Standard to reduce the number of bytes needed to represent text, especially if that text uses mostly characters from a small number of Unicode blocks. ... This article or section may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to be clearer. ... The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) as a character encoding. ... The writing systems of some languages, such as Persian (Farsi), Hebrew, and Arabic are written in a form known as right-to-left (RTL), in which writing begins at the right-hand side of a page and concludes at the left-hand side. ... A Byte Order Mark (BOM) is the character at code point U+FEFF (zero-width no-break space), when that character is used to denote the endianness of a string of UCS/Unicode characters encoded in UTF-16 or UTF-32 and/or as a marker to indicate that text... 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. ... HTML 4. ... Many email clients are now able to use Unicode. ... A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ... Guóbiāo (国标) (GB) in the Peoples Republic of China is the abbreviation of Guójiā Biāozhǔn (国家标准), meaning the National Standards, or Guójiā Biāozhǔn Mǎ (国家标准码), meaning the National Standard Encoding as Chinese character encoding system. ... March 17 is the 76th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (77th in Leap years). ... This article is about the year 2000. ... November 20 is the 324th day of the year (325th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... September 1 is the 244th day of the year (245th in leap years). ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ...

GB18030 can be considered as a Unicode Transformation Format, i.e. an encoding of all Unicode code points that maintains compatibility with a legacy character set. In other words, as a Chinese equivalent of UTF-8, which maintains compatibility with ASCII. Like UTF-8, GB18030 is a superset of ASCII and can represent the whole range of Unicode code points. GB18030 also maintains compatibility with GBK, which was the pre-existing standard character encoding used in the PRC, with the aim of simplifying the upgrade of data and software to use GB18030. Part of the mapping data is from a lookup table (similarly to GBK). The rest is calculated algorithmically. Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ... GBK is an extension of GB2312. ... PRC is a common abbreviation for: Peoples Republic of China Palestinian Red Crescent Popular Resistance Committees This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

Most major computer companies had already standardised on some version of Unicode as the primary format for use in their binary formats and OS calls. However, they mostly had only supported code points in the BMP originally defined in Unicode 1.0, which supported only 65,536 codepoints and was often encoded in 16 bits as UCS-2. Unicode reserves 1,114,112 (= 220 + 216) code points, and currently assigns characters to more than 96,000 of those code points. ... In computing, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are alternative names for a 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, a character encoding form that provides a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or transmission...

In a move of historic significance, the PRC decided to mandate support of certain code points outside the BMP. This means that software can no longer get away with treating characters as 16 bit fixed width entities (UCS-2). Therefore they must either process the data in a variable width format (such as UTF-8 or UTF-16), which are the most common choices, or move to a larger fixed width format (such as UCS-4 or UTF-32). Microsoft made the change from UCS-2 to UTF-16 with Windows 2000. Motto: none Anthem: March of the Volunteers Capital Beijing Largest city Shanghai Official language(s) Chinese1 Government President Premier Communist one-party state2 Hu Jintao Wen Jiabao Establishment  - Declared October 1, 1949 Area  â€¢ Total  â€¢ Water (%)   9,596,9602 km² (4th) 2. ... In computing, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are alternative names for a 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, a character encoding form that provides a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or transmission... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... In computing, UTF-16 is a 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, a character encoding form that provides a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or transmission via data networks. ... UTF-32 and UCS-4 are alternate names for a method of encoding Unicode characters, using the fixed amount of exactly 32 bits for each Unicode code point. ... UTF-32 is a method of encoding Unicode characters, using a fixed amount of 32 bits for each character. ...

The SimSun 18030 font enables the display of the GB 18030 characters, which includes all the characters in Unicode 2.1 plus new characters found in the Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A section.

See also

• Guobiao code
• CJK
• Chinese character encoding
• Comparison of unicode encodings

Guobiao code is a collective term of the national standard encoding of the Peoples Republic of China. ... CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which comprise the main East Asian languages. ... 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. ... This page compares Unicode encodings. ...

External links

• IANA Charset Registration for GB18030
• English language summary of GB 18030-2000
• Introduction to GB18030 including evolution from GB2312 and GBK
• Authoritative mapping table between GB18030 and Unicode (warning: firefox seems to hang on loading this).
• ICU Converter Explorer: GB18030
• Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (PDF, 1.5MB)
• Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (PDF, 13 MB)
• GB18030 Support Package for Windows 2000/XP, including Chinese, Tibetan, Yi, Mongolian and Thai font by Microsoft
• SIL's freeware fonts, editors and documentation