GB18030 - Definition and Overview

GB18030 is the registered internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China. 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 mandatory for all computer operating systems sold in China.

This character set is of historical significance since it is the first widely used character set including characters whose Universal Character Set character numbers (or code points) exceed the value 65,535. This number is the largest number that can be represented in two bytes of computer memory, which means GB18030 includes characters that cannot be represented in any two-byte fixed width (or double byte) character set. Many computer operating systems, such as all versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 2000, use UCS-2 which is a double byte character set. Newer versions of Windows use UTF-16, in which characters are represented by either two or four bytes. When transmitted in E-mail any non-ASCII characters are encoded in MIME format.

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 Extention A section.

See also

• Guobiao code
• CJK
• Chinese character encoding

References

• IANA Charset Registration for GB18030 (http://www.iana.org/assignments/charset-reg/GB18030)
• English language summary of GB 18030-2000 (http://examples.oreilly.com/cjkvinfo/pdf/GB18030_Summary.pdf)