GB and GBK

GB 2312-80

A 94x94 character set for Simplified Chinese. GB is an acronym for Guo²Biao¹, which is short for Guo²jia¹ Biao¹zhun³ 'National Standard.' In Internet Explorer's menu, GB2312 is used in the sense of GBK.

GB has the following encoding forms:

EUC-CN (default)
HZ
ISO-2022-CN

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EUC-CN

Extended Unix Code for Simplified Chinese. An 8-bit encoding form, the default encoding of GB.

Byte-ranges for

     single-byte ASCII:  0x21-0x7E
     double-byte GB:     0xA1-0xFE

Test your browser by selecting Simplified Chinese (GB2312) in View : Character Coding, or View : Encoding. The text in the right column should match the GIF in the left column. Click here if it does not.

GIF	Text
	��

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HZ

A 7-bit encoding form, using the same bytes (0x21-0x7E) to encode single-byte ASCII and double-byte GB. Its name is an acronym for han⁴zi⁴.

The default interpretation of bytes is ASCII. Chinese text is enclosed within braces preceded by tildes:

English ~{ Chinese ~} English

Test your browser by selecting Simplified Chinese (HZ) in View : Character Coding, or View : Encoding. The text in the right column should match the GIF in the left column. Click here if it does not.

GIF	Text
	~{::WV~}

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GBK

A superset of GB2312, containing both Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters. Its name is an acronym for Guo²jia¹ Biao¹zhun³ Kuo⁴zhan³ 'Extended National Standard.' It is encoded in an 8-bit form with the following byte ranges:

     Single-byte ASCII:      0x21-0x7E
     GBK first byte range:   0x81-0xFE
     GBK second byte range:  0x40-0x7E and 0x80-0xFE

Test your browser by selecting Simplified Chinese (GBK) in View : Character Coding, or Simplified Chinese (GB2312) in View : Encoding. The text in the right column should match the GIF in the left column. Click here if it does not.

GIF	Text
	�h�֣��

Contents