GB18030(5)

📦 version 15.1, in freebsd 14.5, freebsd 15.1

💜 gb18030(5) — okay bestie, let's talk GB 18030

so this is the gb18030 manual page from the File Formats Manual section, and it's literally the whole vibe of Chinese text encoding. buckle up 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

gb18030 — the GB 18030 encoding method for Chinese text, and yes she ate 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ENCODING "GB18030"

that's it. that's the whole line. iconic brevity 🫶

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so — the GB18030 encoding implements GB 18030-2000, which is a PRC national standard for encoding Chinese characters. no cap, it's official.

it's a superset of the older GB 2312-1980 and GBK encodings, and it incorporates Unicode's Unihan Extension A completely — like, the whole thing, not just the bits it felt like. it also provides code space for all Unicode 3.0 code points. main character energy fr fr 👑

multibyte characters in GB18030 can be one byte, two bytes, or four bytes long. there are a total of over 1.5 million code positions — that's a LOT of room to breathe 💀

GB 11383-1981 (ASCII) characters are represented by single bytes in the range 0x00 to 0x7F. classic.

Chinese characters are represented as either two bytes or four bytes:

  • two-byte characters begin with a byte in the range 0x81-0xFE and end with a byte either in the range 0x40-0x7E or 0x80-0xFE ✨
  • four-byte characters begin with a byte in the range 0x81-0xFE, have a second byte in the range 0x30-0x39, a third byte in the range 0x81-0xFE, and a fourth byte in the range 0x30-0x39 🔥

like, the pattern is right there, look at her go 🧚

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

also, for the academically inclined besties 📚:

  • Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology -- Chinese ideograms coded character set for information interchange -- Extension for the basic set, March 2000.
  • The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0, The Unicode Consortium, 2000.

🌈 STANDARDS 🌈

the GB18030 encoding is believed to be compatible with GB 18030-2000. believed!! we're trusting her on this one 🙈 (that's the actual wording, don't come for me)

okay that's the whole page, you're basically an encoding expert now, go forth and decode 💖

sign-off szn: this gorgeous little page comes to you from Debian, dated August 10, 2003 — yes she's vintage, yes she still slays, periodt 💅🎀

📦 where this page comes from