Code page 950 is the
code page
In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...
used on
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
for
Traditional Chinese
A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or ...
. It is Microsoft's implementation of the ''
de facto
''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...
'' standard
Big5
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 inst ...
character encoding. The code page is not registered with
IANA
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...
, and hence, it is not a standard to communicate information over the internet, although it is usually labelled simply as , including by Microsoft library functions.
Terminology and variants
The major difference between Windows code page 950 and "common" (non-vendor-specific) Big5 is the incorporation of a subset of the
ETEN extensions to Big5 at
0xF9D6 through 0xF9FE (comprising the seven
Chinese characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
碁, 銹, 裏, 墻, 恒, 粧, and 嫺, followed by 34
box drawing characters and block elements). The ranges used by some of the other ETEN extended characters are instead defined as
end-user defined (private use) characters.
IBM's
CCSID 950 comprises
single byte code page 1114 (CCSID 1114) and
double byte code page 947 (CCSID 947),
and, while also a Big5 variant, is somewhat different from Microsoft's code page 950, incorporating some of the ETEN extensions for lead bytes 0xA3, 0xC6,
0xC7 and 0xC8,
while omitting those with lead byte 0xF9 (which Microsoft includes), mapping them instead to the
Private Use Area as user-defined characters.
It also includes two non-ETEN extension regions with trail bytes 0x81–A0, i.e. outside the usual Big5 trail byte range but similar to the Big5+ trail byte range: area 5 has lead bytes 0xF2–F9 and contains IBM-selected characters, while area 9 has lead bytes 0x81–8C and is a user-defined region.
Microsoft updated their version of code page 950 in 2000, adding the
euro sign
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists ...
(€) at the double-byte code 0xA3E1. IBM refers to the euro sign update of their Big-5 variant as CCSID 1370 (which includes both single-byte (0x80) and double-byte euro signs).
It comprises single byte code page 1114 (CCSID 5210) and double byte code page 947 (CCSID 21427).
For better compatibility with Microsoft's variant in
IBM Db2
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON a ...
, IBM also define the pure double-byte Code page 1372 and associated variable-width CCSID 1373, which includes only the double-byte euro sign and matches Microsoft behaviour in which extension regions are included.
Single byte codes
The following are the single-byte graphical characters included by IBM. The codes 0x00 though 0x1F and 0x7F may be used for
C0 control codes instead, depending on context (compare
code page 437
Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacri ...
,
code page 897
Code page 897 (CCSID 897) is IBM's implementation of the 8-bit form of JIS X 0201. It includes several additional graphical characters in the C0 control characters area, and the code points in question may be used as control characters or graphica ...
). As noted above, the single-byte euro sign at 0x80 is not included in IBM CCSIDs 950 or 1373, nor by Microsoft.
The rest are parts of a double byte sequence.
Private Use Area usage
This mapping is also used in
HKSCS
The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (; commonly abbreviated to HKSCS) is a set of Chinese characters – 4,702 in total in the initial release—used in Cantonese, as well as when writing the names of some places in Hong Kong (whether in w ...
where a given glyph is not yet found in the Unicode revision specified.
See also
*
LMBCS-18
*
Code page 951, a Microsoft hack for replacing cp950 with an HKSCS-enabled version on Windows XP
References
External links
Microsoft's Reference for Code Page 950 Mapping of Code Page 950 to Unicode
*International Components for Unicode (ICU) mapping files
windows-950-2000.ucmibm-950_P110-1999.ucmibm-1373_P100-2002.ucm
{{character encoding
950
Encodings of Asian languages