Chinese character encoding is needed for the display of Chinese characters in computers, used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages (collectively CJK). The following are common Chinese encoding systems:
- Guobiao is used in Mainland China. All Guobiao standards are prefixed by GB, the latest version is GB18030 which is a one, two or four byte encoding.
- Big5, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, is a one or two byte encoding.
- Unicode
The conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese is usually problematic. The traditional to simplified (many-to-one) conversion is simple, but the opposit conversion often results in a data loss. The simplified to traditional (one-to-many) conversion often requires usage context or common phrases to resolve conflicts.
One other issue is that many of the encoding systems are missing characters. While the missing characters are often literary and not commonly used, this does become a problem because people's names often contain these characters. An example of the problem is the Taiwanese politician Wang Jian-Hsuan whose second given name is not in some character systems.
See also: