Chinese Website Encoding

big5 csbig5 csGB2312 gb2312

[jakob77]

Hello everyone!

I dont know a word in any Chinese language, I only know several chinese languages exist.

Which language is the most common one on the internet?

which encoding is the best?

big5 csbig5 csGB2312 gb2312

I know the GBs are simplified chinese.

What does that mean? Are latin characters instead of chinese characters used instead?

would be nice to hear from chinese webmasters.

[Xuefer]

gb2312 which often means gbk, is better
gbk contains most characters but not all, in big5

[Timotheos]

I'll second GB2312

[g1smd]

The GB part loosely stands for National Standard.

In the US you are familiar with ANSI standards, In Europe EN, in Britain BS, and so on.

[jakob77]

what do you mea with I`ll second? you prefer the second one?

[hasbeen]

I get a lot of people asking if our webmail client supports big5. I'm not sure if that means it's the most popular or most common, though.

[Timotheos]

what do you mea with I`ll second? you prefer the second one?

That means, "if you want a second opinion" I would also recommend using GB2312. That's the one I see the most and the one that I've used. Sorry for the confusion.

[dotbiz]

GB2312 is for "Simplifed Chinese", which is used by 1.3 billion people in mainland China. Big5 is "Traditional Chinese", and is used by 30 million people in Taiwan. I believe there are some online tools to convert one to another.

[jakob77]

So there is a direct mapping between those 2?

Or is there only a one-way mapping?

Logically there should be a 100% 1:1 mapping from the Big5 to the simple version?

[Xuefer]

GB=Guo(Country) Biao(Standard)
so it means offical

there's no formula to do the convertion between GBK and Big5, you need a map
some chars created by hk/tw may not included in GBK charset
and Big5 does not contains Simplified Characters
most but not all chars can be map 1->1
there's also some "same meaning" but just "different look" chars
GBK ~= GB2312+Big5
so u may also need a map to conv "simplified"<->"traditional" within gbk<->gbk
there is also GB18032, included more chars, but not that widely supported, and can be mapped into UNICODE, which can be encoded into UTF-8

i don't know much about unicode, but if possible, i'll recommend you have a try on using UNICODE(UCS-2orUTF-8) as Internal Encoding, so it can be mapped from/into both GB2312/Big5

[Trisha]

I know the GBs are simplified chinese.

What does that mean? Are latin characters instead of chinese characters used instead?

Chinese written out in a romanized system/latin characters is called pinyin. Simplified Chinese was created in China in the 50's. It's still Chinese characters, but some of them have been somewhat simplified, as the name suggests.

[dotbiz]

there's no formula to do the convertion between GBK and Big5, you need a map some chars created by hk/tw may not included in GBK charset and Big5 does not contains Simplified Characters....

Theoretically this may be true, but I think at least 99% often used words are common, and the converting is not hard.

There are online tools to do it. Search "Big5/GB convertor" on Google. mandarintools.com is a good place to start. I noticed an online service to convert whole web pages on the fly between these two codes some time ago, but I cannot remember the website any more.