GB 18030

GB18030 is a Chinese government standard describing the required language and character support necessary for software in China. In addition to the "GB18030 code page" this standard contains requirements about which scripts must be supported, font support, etc.

GB18030 as a code page

GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. This character set is formally called "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2005: Information technology — Chinese coded character set". GB abbreviates Guójiā Biāozhǔn (国家标准), which means national standard in Chinese. The standard was published by the China Standard Press, Beijing, November 8, 2005. Only a portion of the standard is mandatory. Since May 1, 2006, support for the mandatory subset is officially required for all software products sold in the PRC. Due to its Unicode equivalence, GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

An older version of the standard, known as "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology — Chinese ideograms coded character set for information interchange — Extension for the basic set", was published on March 17, 2000. The encoding scheme remains the same in the new version, except that code points for the characters ḿ and ɟ have been exchanged. More code points are now associated with characters due to update of Unicode, especially the appearance of CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B. Some characters used by ethnic minorities in China, such as Mongolian characters and Tibetan characters (GB 16959-1997 and GB/T 20542-2006), have been added as well, which accounts for the renaming of the standard.