About GB2312 Encoding
In accordance with the conclusion on consolidating and simplifying mandatory standards in Notice No. 7 of 2017, this standard was converted into a recommended standard on March 23, 2017, and is no longer mandatory. GB2312 encoding is applicable to information exchange between systems for processing and communicating Chinese characters and is widely used in mainland China; it is also used in Singapore and elsewhere. Almost all Chinese systems and international software in mainland China support GB2312.
The basic encoding set includes 6,763 Chinese characters and 682 non-Chinese graphic symbols. The entire character set is divided into 94 zones, each with 94 positions. Each position contains only one character, so the zone and position can be used to encode Chinese characters; this is called the zone-position code. Adding the zone-position code, converted to hexadecimal, to 2020H produces the national standard code. Adding 8080H to the national standard code produces the widely used internal computer code.
In 1995, the «Chinese Character Encoding Extension Specification» (GBK) was also published. GBK is compatible with the internal encoding standard corresponding to national standard GB/T 2312-1980 and supports a total of 20,902 Chinese characters at the repertoire level of ISO/IEC10646-1 and GB13000-1 for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK).