GB 18030

GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as Information Technology — Chinese coded character set and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. As a Unicode Transformation Format (i.e. an encoding of all Unicode code points), GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. It is also compatible with legacy encodings including GB/T 2312, CP936, and GBK 1.0. The Unicode Consortium has warned implementers that the latest version of this Chinese standard, GB 18030-2022, introduces what they describe as "disruptive changes" from the previous version GB 18030-2005 "involving 33 different characters and 55 code positions". GB 18030-2022 was enforced from 1 August 2023. It has been implemented in ICU 73.2; and in Java 21, and backported to older Java 8, 11, 17 (LTS releases) and 20.0.2. In addition to the encoding method, this standard contains requirements about which additional scripts and languages should be represented, and to whom this standard is applicable. This standard however does not define the official character forms for the Chinese characters; this is standardised in List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters.