Chinese Encoding, Introduction

Here's a summary of major Chinese encoding.

GB2312

year 1980. Simplified Characters only. Was used in China. ASCII compatible.

GBK

year 1993. Extended GB2312. Includes traditional chars.

GB18030

year 2005. Extended both GB2312 and GBK. Charset equivalent to Unicode.

Contains both simplified and traditional characters. [see 简体繁體字表 List of Simplified/Traditional Chinese Characters] ASCII compatible. Used in China.

BIG5

year 1984. Traditional chars only. Invented in Taiwan. Was used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, before Unicode became popular.

Note, as of 2022, vast majority of Chinese websites use UTF-8, including in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong. [see Chinese Websites Encoding survey, Year 2022]