Editing Chinese character encoding (section)

{{Short description|Representation of CJK characters on computers}}
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In computing, '''Chinese character encodings''' can be used to represent text written in the [[CJK characters|CJK]] languages—[[Chinese language|Chinese]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]], [[Korean language|Korean]]—and (rarely) obsolete [[Chữ Nôm|Vietnamese]], all of which use [[Chinese character]]s. Several general-purpose [[character encoding]]s accommodate Chinese characters, and some of them were developed specifically for Chinese.

In addition to [[Unicode]] (with the set of [[CJK Unified Ideographs]]), local encoding systems exist. The Chinese [[Guobiao code|Guobiao]] (or GB, "national standard") system is used in [[mainland China]] and [[Singapore]], and the (mainly) Taiwanese [[Big5]] system is used in [[Taiwan]], [[Hong Kong]] and [[Macau]] as the two primary "legacy" local encoding systems. Guobiao is usually displayed using [[Simplified Chinese character|simplified characters]] and Big5 is usually displayed using [[traditional Chinese characters|traditional characters]]. There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system and the font used to display the characters; font and encoding are usually tied together for practical reasons.

The issue of which encoding to use can also have political implications, as GB is the official standard of the [[China|People's Republic of China]] and Big5 is a ''[[de facto]]'' standard of [[Taiwan]].

In contrast to the [[Han unification|situation with Japanese]], there has been relatively little overt opposition to Unicode, which solves many of the issues involved with GB and Big5.  Unicode is widely regarded as politically neutral, has good support for both simplified and traditional characters, and can be easily converted to and from the GB and Big5.  Furthermore, Unicode has the advantage of not being limited only to Chinese, since it contains character codes for (nearly) every language.