Gbk - Relationship To Other Encodings

Relationship To Other Encodings

The areas indicated in the previous section as GBK/1 and GBK/2, taken by themselves, is simply GB2312-80 in its usual encoding. GB2312, or more properly the EUC-CN encoding thereof, takes a pair of bytes from the range A1FE, like any 94² ISO-2022 character set loaded into GR. This corresponds to the lower-right quarter of the illustration above. However, GB2312 does not assign any code points to the rows located at ABB0 and F8FE, even though it had staked out the territory.

GBK added extensions to this. You can see that the two gaps were filled in with user-defined areas.

More significantly, it extended the range of the bytes. Having two-byte characters in the ISO-2022 GR range gives a limit of 94²=8,836 possibilities. Abandoning the ISO-2022 model of strict regions for graphics and control characters, but retaining the feature of low bytes being 1-byte characters and pairs of high bytes denoting a character, you could potentially have 128²=16,384 positions. GBK takes part of that, extending the range from A1FE (94 choices for each byte) to 81FE (126 choices) for the first byte and 40FE (191 choices) for the second byte, for a total of 24,066 positions.

Microsoft's Code Page 936 is generally thought of as being GBK. It has bytes in the same range, with assignments that seem to match if you compare them. However, the total number of two-byte code points defined is 21,791 so there must be some differences—at the very least, 95 are missing.

GBK's successor, GB18030-2000, uses the remaining range available to the second byte to further expand the number of possibilities while retaining GBK as a subset.

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