Editing Chinese character encoding (section)

== Conversion ==

Prior to [[GBK (character encoding)|GBK]] which includes both traditional and simplified characters, conversion between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese charsets was complicated by the need of transcribing text between the two variants of Chinese, as one charset cover many of the other's characters only in its own variant. The conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese is usually problematic, because the simplification of some traditional forms merged two or more different characters into one simplified form. The traditional to simplified (many-to-one) conversion is technically simple. The opposite conversion often results in a data loss when converting to [[GB 2312]]: in mapping one-to-many when assigning traditional glyphs to the simplified glyphs, some characters will inevitably be the wrong choices in some of the usages. Thus simplified to traditional conversion often requires usage context or common phrase lists to resolve conflicts. This issue is less of a problem with newer standards such as GBK, GB 18030 and Unicode, which have separate code points for both simplified and traditional characters. {{citation needed|reason=Doesn't it still need conversion?|date=April 2018}}

One other issue is that many of the encoding systems are missing characters. While the missing characters are often literary and not commonly used in ordinary text, this does become a problem because people's names often contain these characters. An example of the problem is the Taiwanese politician [[Wang Chien-shien]] who has a {{transliteration|zh|pinyin|xuān}} ({{lang|zh|煊}}) character in his name which is not in some character systems, and former Chinese premier [[Zhu Rongji]], whose {{transliteration|zh|pinyin|róng}} ({{lang|zh|镕}}) character is not in GB 2312. The newest GB standard, GB 18030 has the complete character repertoire of Unicode 4.0, including the [[Unihan]] extensions in the [[Supplementary Ideographic Plane]].<ref name="cjkv-info-proc"/>{{rp|105}}