GBK (character encoding)

GBK is an extension of GB2312. 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 formally unrepresentable, like the "rong" character in former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's name, are now representable.

History

In 1993, the Unicode 1.1 standard was released, this time including 20,902 characters used in China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea.

Following which, China released a Guobiao equivalent of Unicode 1.1, GB13000.1-93. Accomodating the characters of GB13000.1-93 among the unused codepoints in GB2312-80, China set the GBK character set.

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. Moreover, 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 existance was simply to bridge the gap between GB2312-80 and GB13000.1-93

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