Guobiao code is a collective term of the national standard encodings of the People's Republic of China.
In computer contexts, "GB" alone is often used to mention GB 2312-80 issued in 1981, GBK , or GB 18030-2000 issued in 2000. These are encoding standards for Chinese characters.
These character encoding methods are used to code for Simplified Chinese characters, which are used in Mainland China and Singapore. Taiwan and Hong Kong, which use Traditional Chinese characters, have Big5 as their standard.
There are 6763 Chinese characters in the GB 2312-80 codeset, versus 13053 in the Big5 codeset. Some other symbols, such as punctuations, full-width Latin alphabets, Greek alphabets, Russian Cyrillic alphabets and Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are also included in GB 2312-80 charset.
The pinyin, romanization of these characters, is standardized as well. It can be used
as one of the several Chinese input systems (e.g., by typing Z-H-O-N-G for the character 中)
See Also
