GB18030

GB18030 is a Chinese national standard for character encoding. It is an extension of the GB2312 and GBK character sets, aiming to support all characters used in China, including Han characters, ethnic minority languages, and various symbols. The standard is a variable-width encoding, meaning that characters can be represented using one, two, three, or four bytes. This allows for a much larger character set than fixed-width encodings. GB18030 is designed to be backward compatible with GBK and GB2312, ensuring that older data can still be processed. It is also compatible with Unicode, meaning that characters encoded in GB18030 can be mapped to their corresponding Unicode code points. The standard was first published in 2000 and has been updated since. It is widely used in China for text processing, software localization, and internet communication. The implementation of GB18030 support is crucial for applications operating within or interacting with the Chinese market to correctly display and process a wide range of characters.