GB2312GBK

GB2312 is an older Chinese character encoding standard. It was developed in China and primarily covers simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 uses a two-byte encoding scheme for Chinese characters, with the first byte ranging from 0xA1 to 0xFE and the second byte also ranging from 0xA1 to 0xFE. This standard is a subset of the larger GBK encoding.

GBK is an extended version of GB2312. It was introduced to include more Chinese characters, including traditional Chinese characters, as well as a wider range of punctuation and symbols. GBK also uses a two-byte encoding for most characters, but it expands the range of assignable codes. This allowed for a much larger character set than GB2312. Both GB2312 and GBK are widely used in mainland China and Singapore for processing Chinese text. However, they are not directly compatible with Unicode, which is the international standard for character encoding. The transition to Unicode, particularly UTF-8, is becoming increasingly prevalent for broader compatibility.