Technical Details
The four byte scheme can be thought of as consisting of two units, each of two bytes. Each unit has a similar format to a GBK two byte character but with a range of values for the second byte of 0x30–0x39 (the ASCII codes for decimal digits). The first byte has the range 0x81 to 0xFE, as before. This means that a string search routine that is safe for GBK should also be reasonably safe for GB18030 (in much the same way that a basic byte-oriented search routine is reasonably safe for EUC).
This gives a total of 1,587,600 (126×10×126×10) possible 4 byte sequences, which is easily sufficient to cover Unicode's 1,111,998 (17×65536 − 2048 surrogates − 66 noncharacters) assigned and reserved code points. (Surrogates and noncharacters are considered designated but not assigned.)
Unfortunately, to further complicate matters there are no simple rules to translate between a 4 byte sequence and its corresponding code point. Instead, codes are allocated sequentially (with the first byte containing the most significant part and the last the least significant part) only to Unicode code points that are not mapped in any other manner. For example:
U+00DE (Þ) → 81 30 89 37 U+00DF (ß) → 81 30 89 38 U+00E0 (à) → A8 A4 U+00E1 (á) → A8 A2 U+00E2 (â) → 81 30 89 39 U+00E3 (ã) → 81 30 8A 30Read more about this topic: GB 18030
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