GB2312

GB2312, officially GB 2312-1980, is a Chinese national standard for encoding Simplified Chinese characters. Developed by the People's Republic of China to provide a uniform way to represent Chinese text in computers and telecommunication systems, GB2312 uses a two-byte code that is partially compatible with ASCII for common symbols and control codes.

Encoding scheme: It employs a 94-by-94 code matrix, enabling up to 8,836 two-byte combinations. Of these, about 6,763 are assigned to graphic characters. The first byte ranges from 0xA1 to 0xFE and the second byte from 0xA1 to 0xFE, placing GB2312 within the common two-byte encodings used for East Asian languages.

Character repertoire: The standard primarily covers Simplified Chinese characters and basic punctuation, along with Latin letters and numerals. It is designed for Mainland China and is not designed to include most Traditional Chinese characters; such characters are largely outside GB2312 and were added later in extensions such as GBK and GB18030.

History and usage: GB2312 was published in 1980 as a foundational encoding for Chinese text. It became the dominant encoding for Simplified Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s. It is now considered legacy in new systems, with modern practice favoring Unicode encodings such as UTF-8, though GB2312 data remains in many older documents and software.

Relation to other standards: GB2312 served as the basis for GBK (an expanded two-byte encoding) and GB18030 (a mandatory superset), which together provide broader character coverage. In contemporary computing, Unicode/UTF-8 has supplanted GB2312 for most new applications, but GB2312 remains relevant for historical and compatibility reasons.