CJK Character Sets and Encoding Forms

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Contents

• Basic notions
• The most popular character sets and encoding forms
• Test your Browser
• Next pages
  • Definitions
  • Character sets and encoding forms listed by language
  • The META tag
  • Code conversion tools
• Links

Basic Notions

• CHARACTER SET
  A list of characters in a specified order.
• ENCODING
  The encoding of a character set is how its characters are represented in bits and bytes.
• DECODING
  The decoding of a sequence of bytes is turning them into readable characters.

The most popular character sets and encoding forms

Languages	Character Sets	Encoding Forms
Multilingual	Unicode	UTF-8
		UTF-16
Traditional Chinese	Big5	Big5
Simplified Chinese	GB	EUC-CN
Japanese	JIS	EUC-JP
		Shift-JIS
Korean	KSC	EUC-KR

Click here for a bigger table.

Test your Browser

If you try to read a document in the wrong decoding mode, you will see gibberish instead of intelligible text.  You can change the decoding mode of your browser by clicking on View : Character Coding, or View  Encoding.

These two bytes	α
should be displayed as		alpha	in	Multilingual	UTF-8	decoding mode
		qia4	in	Traditional Chinese	Big5
		wei3	in	Simplified Chinese	GB2312
		ryuu	in	Japanese	EUC-JP
		gwan	in	Korean	EUC-KR

Click here if your browser does not properly decode CJK.

Links

• Characters and encodings by Jukka Korpela
• Microsoft Codepages
• Unicode Charts
• Ken Lunde's CJKV Information Processing and CJKV Character Set Server
• Download cjk.inf and japan.inf
• Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings by Ross Paterson (mirrored at CityU and CCU)
• Understanding Korean Information Processing by Woohyong Choi
• A Brief History of Character Codes by Steven J. Searle
• Development of kanji codes for computers by Christian Wittern