GBK

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GBK is an extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters, used in the People's Republic of China.

GB stands for National Standard, while K stands for Extension. GBK not only extended the old standard GB2312 with Traditional Chinese characters, but also with Chinese characters that were simplified after the establishment of GB2312 in 1981. With the arrival of GBK, certain names with characters formerly unrepresentable, like the "rong" (鎔) character in former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's name, are now representable.

[edit] History

In 1993, the Unicode 1.1 standard was released, including 20,902 characters used in mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Following this, China released GB13000.1-93, a national standard (guóbiāo) equivalent of Unicode 1.1.

The GBK character set was defined in 1993 as an extension of GB2312-80, while also including the characters of GB13000.1-93 through the unused codepoints available in GB2312. Hence GBK is upward compatible with GB2312.

Microsoft implemented GBK in Windows 95 as Code Page 936 (CP936). While GBK was never an official standard, widespread usage of Windows 95 led to GBK becoming the de facto standard. While GBK included all the Chinese characters defined in Unicode 1.1 and GB13000.1-93, these standards used different code tables. The primary reason for its existence was simply to bridge the gap between GB2312-80 and GB13000.1-93.

In 2000, the GB18030-2000 standard was released, superseding yet maintaining compatibility with GBK. It increased the number of definitions of Chinese characters and extended the number of possible characters through the implementation of four-byte character spaces.