GBK

GBK is a character encoding designed for Simplified Chinese and widely used in Mainland China. It extends the earlier GB2312 standard to cover a much larger set of characters, including additional Simplified Chinese ideographs, punctuation, and less common symbols. GBK is commonly encountered in legacy software and data, especially on Windows systems, where it is implemented as code page 936 in many environments.

Technically, GBK is primarily a two-byte encoding. The first byte ranges from 0x81 to 0xFE, and the second byte from 0x40 to 0xFE, excluding 0x7F. ASCII characters in the range 0x00 to 0x7F remain unchanged. The two-byte sequences map to a large repertoire of characters beyond those available in GB2312, enabling representation of many additional Chinese characters as well as some non-Chinese symbols.

GBK is part of the broader GB character set family and is largely superseded by GB18030, the newer national standard introduced in the 2000s. GB18030 provides complete coverage of the Unicode repertoire and includes GBK’s mappings as part of its extended repertoire, ensuring round-trip compatibility with Unicode in modern systems. Despite this, GBK remains in use for compatibility with older documents, software, and data that were encoded before GB18030 became prevalent.

See also: GB2312, GB18030, Unicode, Windows code pages (such as CP936).