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Concept
Big5
Summary
Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters.
The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set instead.
Big5 gets its name from the consortium of five companies in Taiwan that developed it.
The original Big5 character set is sorted first by usage frequency, second by stroke count, lastly by Kangxi radical.
The original Big5 character set lacked many commonly used characters. To solve this problem, each vendor developed its own extension. The ETen extension became part of the current Big5 standard through popularity.
The structure of Big5 does not conform to the ISO 2022 standard, but rather bears a certain similarity to the Shift JIS encoding. It is a double-byte character set (DBCS) with the following structure:
(the prefix 0x signifying hexadecimal numbers).
Standard assignments (excluding vendor or user-defined extensions) do not use the bytes through , nor , as either lead (first) or trail (second) bytes. Bytes through are used for both lead and trail bytes for double-byte (Big5) codes. Bytes through are used as trail bytes following a lead byte, or for single-byte codes otherwise. If the second byte is not in either range, behavior is unspecified (i.e., varies from system to system). Additionally, certain variants of the Big5 character set, for example the HKSCS, use an expanded range for the lead byte, including values in the to range (similar to Shift JIS), whereas others use reduced lead byte ranges (for instance, the Apple Macintosh variant uses through as single-byte codes, limiting the lead byte range to through ).
The numerical value of individual Big5 codes are frequently given as a 4-digit hexadecimal number, which describes the two bytes that comprise the Big5 code as if the two bytes were a big endian representation of a 16-bit number. For example, the Big5 code for a full-width space, which are the bytes , is usually written as or just A140.
Official source
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