GuoBiao (Chinese)

Guo2jia1 Biao2zhun3 (Chinese for "national standard", abbreviated Guo2Biao1 or GB) refers to standards promulgated by the PRC. The following character sets are included:

The basic set: GB 2312-80

GB 2312-80 (GB0, GB) is designed to represent simplified Chinese characters, and is a national standard in the PRC. It is also used in Singapore. The rows are:

01
special symbols (94)
02
paragraph numbers (72)
03
GB 1988-80 (94, = ISO 646-CN)
04
hiragana (83)
05
katakana (86)
06
Greek (48)
07
Cyrillic (66)
08
pinyin accented vowels (26) and zhuyin symbols (37)
09
box and table drawing pieces (76)
16-55
hanzi level 1 (3755, ordered by pinyin)
56-87
hanzi level 2 (3008, ordered by radical, then stroke)

The GB 1988-80 set is the Chinese extension of ISO 646. It differs from US-ASCII only in having a yuan/yen symbol in place of the dollar sign (24) and an overline in place of the tilde (7E).

Variations and extensions of GB 2312-80

GB 6345.1-86 is a revision of GB 2312-80:

Further details are available in English and Chinese (encoded in GB 2312-80).

GB 8565.2-89 (GB8) is intended as an extension of GB 2312-80, and contains additional simplified hanzi in the following rows:

12
hanzi (92, from GB 7590-87, ordered by radical)
13
hanzi (50, from GB 7589-87, ordered by radical)
15
date and time symbols (69) and miscellaneous hanzi (24, ordered by radical)
90-94
hanzi (470, from GB 7589-87, ordered by radical)

The character set ISO-IR-165 comprises GB 2312-80, as modified by GB 6345.1-86 (except for the alteration to row 79, cell 81), and GB 8565.2-89, plus

GB 12345-90 (GB1) is a code for traditional hanzi, parallel to GB 2312-80 with the following additional rows:

88-89
hanzi level 3: an extra 103 characters so that the traditional counterparts of GB 2312-80 level 1 hanzi are uniquely represented (103, ordered by pinyin).

Further information is available on the mapping between the two sets.

Other sets

Some other sets have been defined, but (like GB1) are not widely supported:

GB 7589-87 (GB3)
7237 simplified hanzi in radical order (rows 16-92)
GB 7590-87 (GB5)
7039 simplified hanzi in radical order (rows 16-90)
General Purpose Han Characters for Modern Chinese (GB7)
43 simplified hanzi (row 1)
GB 12052-89 (Korean)
94 Korean Idu characters (row 71 cells 89-94 and row 72 cells 1-88)
GB 13131-94
traditional version of GB 7589-87
GB 13132-94
traditional version of GB 7590-87

Special versions used in ISO/IEC 10646

ISO/IEC 10646 (and the Unicode cross-reference tables) refer to a number of codes in GB sets beyond GB 2312-80 that are not part of the official standards, but were added by China solely for this purpose. They include:

GB 12345-90
additional rows:
92
Hong Kong hanzi (58)
93
Korean Idu characters (94, from GB 12052-89)
GB 8565.2-89
The characters added for ISO-IR-165, plus 8 hanzi (?) in row 8.

Further, the versions of GB 7589-87 and GB 7590-87 submitted by China for this purpose used the traditional forms of the hanzi.


Part of Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings.