KS X 1001, "''Code for Information Interchange (Hangul and Hanja)''", formerly called KS C 5601, is a South Korean

coded character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical values that make up a c ...

standard to represent

Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

and

Hanja Hanja (; ), alternatively spelled Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language. After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period. () ...

characters on a computer. KS X 1001 is encoded by the most common legacy (pre-

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

)

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s for

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, people from the Korean peninsula or of Korean descent * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Korean **Korean dialects **See also: North–South differences in t ...

, including

EUC-KR Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese language, Japanese, Korean language, Korean, and simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese (characters). The most commonly used EUC codes are va ...

and Microsoft's

Unified Hangul Code Unified Hangul Code (UHC), or Extended Wansung, also known under Microsoft Windows as Code Page 949 (Windows-949, MS949 or ambiguously CP949), is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Korean language. It is an extension of Wansung Code ( KS C ...

(UHC). It contains Korean Hangul syllables, CJK ideographs (Hanja),

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

, Japanese (

Hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

and

Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

) and some other characters. KS X 1001 is arranged as a 94×94 table, following the structure of 2-byte code words in

ISO 2022 ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/IEC standard in the field of character encoding. It is equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japanes ...

and EUC. Therefore, its

code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...

s are pairs of integers 1–94. However, some encodings (UHC and

Johab KS X 1001, "''Code for Information Interchange (Hangul and Hanja)''", formerly called KS C 5601, is a South Korean coded character set standard to represent Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language ...

), in addition to providing codes for every code point, provide additional codes for characters otherwise representable only as code point sequences.

History

This standard was previously known as KS C 5601. There have been several revisions of this standard. For example, there were revisions in 1987, 1992, 1998 and 2002. The present, double-byte, Wansung () character set was standardised by the third edition of KS C 5601, which was published in 1986. It is an

compatible encoding, typically used in EUC form, which assigns double-byte codes for non-Hangul, Hangul jamo, and the most common Hangul syllables, in contrast to Johab () which is not compatible with ISO 2022, but assigns double-byte codes to all Hangul syllables using modern jamo. Wansung is technically a variable-length encoding, allowing other syllables to be represented with eight-byte sequences (using the jamo and Hangul Filler character), but this feature is not always implemented. The earliest edition of KS C 5601, published in 1974, defined a variable-length 7-bit character set which assigned single-byte code points to 51 basic

Hangul jamo This is the list of Hangul ''jamo'' (Korean alphabet letters which represent consonants and vowels in Korean) including obsolete ones. This list contains Unicode code points. In the lists below, * code points in were added in .

, somewhat analogously to JIS C 6220, in an encoding known as "N-byte Hangul". The second edition, published in 1982, retained the main character set from the 1974 edition but defined two supplementary sets, including a version of Johab. Neither edition was adopted as widely as intended. Wansung was kept unchanged in the 1987 and 1992 editions. In the 1992 edition, additional annex material was added, including the definition of the Johab encoding in annex 3, and the older N-byte Hangul encoding in annex 4. It was published in response to industry use of Johab as a competing encoding to Wansung, being used at the time by Hangul Word Processor. Following the introduction of

by Microsoft in

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

, and Hangul Word Processor abandoning Johab in favour of

in 2000, Johab ceased to be commonly used.

Encodings

Encoding schemes of KS X 1001 include

(in both

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

and

ISO 646 ISO/IEC 646 ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'', is an International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC standard in the ...

-KR based variants, the latter of which includes a won currency sign (

₩ The won sign , is a currency symbol. It represents the South Korean won, the North Korean won and, unofficially, the old Korean Empire won, Korean won. Appearance Its appearance is "W" (the first letter of "Won") with a horizontal strike ...

) at byte 0x5C rather than a backslash) and

ISO-2022-KR ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/ IEC standard in the field of character encoding. It is equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japane ...

, as well as ISO-2022-JP-2 (which also encodes

JIS X 0208 JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...

and JIS X 0212). These all have the drawback that they only assign codes for the 2350 precomposed Hangul syllables which have their own KS X 1001 codepoints (out of 11172 in total, not counting those using obsolete jamo), and require others to use eight-byte composition sequences, which are not supported by some partial implementations of the standard. The

encoding (stipulated in annex 3 of the 1992 version of the standard) and the EUC-KR superset known as

(UHC, also called Windows-949) provide single codes for all 11172 Hangul syllables. ISO-2022-KR and Johab are rarely used. Some operating systems extend this standard in other non-uniform ways, e.g. the EUC-KR extensions MacKorean on the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

, and IBM-949 by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Hangul Filler

The Hangul Filler character is used to introduce eight-byte Hangul composition sequences and to stand in for an absent element (usually an empty final) in such a sequence. Unicode includes the Wansung code Hangul Filler in the Hangul Compatibility Jamo block for round-trip compatibility, but uses its own system (with its own, differently used, filler characters) for composing Hangul. The KS X 1001 Hangul composition system is not used in Unicode, and the filler renders merely as an empty space; KS X 1001 composition sequences using modern jamo may be mapped to precomposed characters in Unicode. This is not usually done with

. For round-trip compatibility, Unicode also includes the N-byte Hangul code Hangul Filler separately in the

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms In CJK characters, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth and halfwidth characters. Unlike monospaced fonts, a halfwidth character occupies half the width of a fullwidth characte ...

block, named the "Halfwidth Hangul Filler".

Wansung code charts

Following are the code charts for KS X 1001 in Wansung layout. Where a pair of hexadecimal numbers is given, the smaller is used when encoded over GL (0x21-0x7E), as in

when the Korean set has been shifted to, and the larger is used in the more typical case of it being encoded over GR (0xA1-0xFE), as in

or UHC.

changes the arrangement to encode all 11172 Hangul clusters separately and in order. To illustrate vendor differences in implementation, multiple Unicode mappings are shown for some characters. Apple's HangulTalk extensions to the Wansung plane (i.e. where both bytes are in the 0xA1-0xFE range) are shown, but other HangulTalk extension ranges are not. The additional codes for composed syllables in Unified Hangul Code, and IBM's extensions in IBM-949, are also not shown, since both fall outside of the Wansung plane.

Lead bytes

Non-Hanja non-precomposed sets

The rows 41 and 94 may be used for user-defined purposes.

Character set 0x21 / 0xA1 (row number 1, special characters)

This set contains punctuation and other symbols, excluding punctuation present in KS X 1003 (which is included in row 3). Encodings which combine KS X 1001 with single-byte ASCII may use alternative Unicode mapping to the

block for the backslash. Unicode mapping of the wave dash (tilde dash) also differs between vendors, and may be U+301C (favoured by IBM and Apple) or U+223C (favoured by Microsoft). Compare the similar but not identical handling of the JIS wave dash, and the handling of the tilde in the next row. Except for the backslash, if two mappings are shown below, the first is used by Apple and the second is used by Microsoft.

Character set 0x22 / 0xA2 (row number 2, special characters)

This set contains additional punctuation and symbols. Similarly to the tilde character in the previous row, different mappings are used by Apple and Microsoft for the tilde character in this row (U+02DC by Apple, FF5E by Microsoft), which is intended to be shown as a raised tilde, whereas the tilde in the previous row is intended to be shown in-line at dash height. Mapping of the circled dot also differs. The euro and registered trademark sign were added to the standard in 1998, while the Korean postal mark (㉾) was added in 2002. These three code points, as with the still-unused code points, have been put to use for other, non-standard, purposes by vendors, e.g. for boxed list markers by Apple. Microsoft updated its

implementation to add the 1998 additions including the euro sign, but did not add the Korean postal mark when it was added to the standard.

Character set 0x23 / 0xA3 (row number 3, basic Latin / ISO 646-KR)

This set corresponds to KS X 1003 (the

variant for Korean, a similar set to

), but as two-byte codes preceded by 0x23 (or 0xA3 in GR-invoked (EUC) form). It includes the

English alphabet Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 Letter (alphabet), letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word ''alphabet'' is a Compound (linguistics), compound of ''alpha'' and ''beta'', t ...

/ Basic Latin alphabet,

western Arabic numerals The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numerals. ...

and punctuation. Compare the Roman set of

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. ...

, which differs by including a

Yen sign The yen and yuan sign (¥) is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Latin scripts. This character resembles a capital letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually ...

rather than a

Won sign The won sign , is a currency symbol. It represents the South Korean won, the North Korean won and, unofficially, the old Korean won. Appearance Its appearance is "W" (the first letter of "Won") with a horizontal strike going through the ...

. Contrast the third rows of KPS 9566 and of JIS X 0208, which follow the ISO 646 layout but only include letters and digits. Encodings such as EUC-KR and UHC combine KS X 1001 with single-byte ASCII or KS X 1003, and hence use alternative Unicode mappings to the

block for the double-byte representations of these characters.

Character set 0x24 / 0xA4 (row number 4, Hangul jamo)

This set includes modern Hangul consonants, followed by vowels, both ordered by South Korean collation customs, followed by obsolete consonants. When used individually, these characters map to the Unicode Hangul Compatibility Jamo block, and do not have a one-to-one mapping with the position-specific characters in the

Hangul Jamo This is the list of Hangul ''jamo'' (Korean alphabet letters which represent consonants and vowels in Korean) including obsolete ones. This list contains Unicode code points. In the lists below, * code points in were added in .

block. Compare with row 4 of the North Korean KPS 9566. Character 04-52 is a Hangul Filler (see

above Above may refer to: *Above (artist) Tavar Zawacki (b. 1981, California) is a Polish, Portuguese - American abstract artist and internationally recognized visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. From 1996 to 2016, he created work under the ...

), used in combining sequences.

Character set 0x25 / 0xA5 (row number 5, Roman numerals and Greek)

This set contains

Roman numerals Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...

and basic support for the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

, without diacritics or the

final sigma Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operato ...

. Apple includes some additional punctuation in this row, as well as some black circled list markers continuing from those in row 6. Contrast row 6 of KPS 9566, which includes the same characters but in a different layout.

Character set 0x26 / 0xA6 (row number 6, box drawing)

This row contains characters for drawing boxes in a semigraphic context. Apple also includes some black circled list markers.

Character set 0x27 / 0xA7 (row number 7, unit symbols)

This row contains unit symbols as single characters, including those which consist of multiple letters. Apple also includes some circled list markers continuing from those in row 8. Compare and contrast with the repertoire of unit symbols included in row 8 of KPS 9566.

Character set 0x28 / 0xA8 (row number 8, extended Latin, encircled, fractions)

Character set 0x29 / 0xA9 (row number 9, extended Latin, encircled, superscript and subscript)

Character set 0x2A / 0xAA (row number 10, Hiragana)

This set contains

for writing the

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

. Apple also includes some bracketed list markers continuing from those in row 9. Compare row 10 of KPS 9566, which uses the same layout. Compare and contrast row 4 of JIS X 0208, which also uses the same layout, but in a different row.

Character set 0x2B / 0xAB (row number 11, Katakana)

This set contains

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

for writing the

. However, the Japanese long vowel mark, which is used in katakana text and included in row 1 of

, is not included. Apple also includes some bracketed list markers continuing from those in rows 9 and 10. Compare row 11 of KPS 9566, which uses the same layout. Compare and contrast row 5 of JIS X 0208, which also uses the same layout, but in a different row.

Character set 0x2C / 0xAC (row number 12, Cyrillic)

This set contains the modern

Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet (, or , more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten vowels (, , , , , , , , , ) ...

, and is not necessarily sufficient to represent other forms of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

. Apple also includes some black boxed list markers. Compare row 5 of KPS 9566 and row 7 of JIS X 0208, which use the same layout (but in a different row).

Extended character set 0x2D / 0xAD (row number 13, Apple additional punctuation)

Precomposed Hangul sets (rows number 16 through 40)

Code points for precomposed Hangul are included in a continuous sorted block between code points 16-01 and 40-94 inclusive. Not all possible syllable clusters are included in this range. Compare the different ordering and availability in KPS 9566. Initial+vowel+final syllables 뢨, 썅, 쏀, 쓩, and 쭁 are included but their initial+vowel counterparts 뢔, 쌰, 쎼, 쓔, and 쬬 are not. This can cause a problem with inputting, because input methods have to go through an initial+vowel syllable first in order to get to an initial+vowel+final syllable (e.g. ㅎ → 하 → 한). Those which are not listed here may be represented using eight-byte composition sequences. All other modern-jamo clusters are assigned codes elsewhere by UHC. All possible modern-jamo clusters are assigned codes by Johab.

Statistics by jamo

Hanja sets (rows number 42 through 93)

KS X 1001 encodes several Hanja with multiple readings multiple times. One character, 樂, is encoded four times. The first 268 characters (U+F900–U+FA0B) in the CJK Compatibility Ideographs block correspond to these duplicates. In the table below, the first row-cell value (and reading) for each Hanja maps to the

CJK Unified Ideographs The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Uni ...

block; others map to the CJK Compatibility Ideographs block.

Johab encoding

KS X 1001, since 1992, also defines an alternative encoding known as Johab. This represents a Hangul syllable as the sequence of three five-bit values, split across two 8-bit bytes, most significant bit first. The most significant bit of the lead byte is always set (allowing combination with single-byte

or KS X 1003). This encoding is also used for the modern jamo from row 4 of KS X 1001, by using the filler values for the other components. The Johab encoding for Hangul is shown in the table below. Johab encodes the remainder of KS X 1001 using lead bytes which do not correspond to an initial jamo (0xE0–0xF9 for

and 0xD9–0xDE for non-Hanja, excluding Hangul syllables and modern jamo), with trail bytes in the ranges 0x31–0x7E and 0x91–0xFE. These codes are algorithmically mapped from the characters' KS X 1001 code points, with two KS X 1001 rows per lead byte (compare and contrast

Shift JIS Shift JIS (also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS ...

The ASCII-based Johab encoding is numbered Code page 1361 by Microsoft. Other, vendor-defined, Johab variants also exist; for example,

defines one for use as a

Shift Out Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original purpose of these characters was to provide a way to shift a coloured ...

set with

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding si ...

. That variant uses

shift in Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original purpose of these characters was to provide a way to shift a coloured ...

and

shift out Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original purpose of these characters was to provide a way to shift a coloured ...

to switch between a single-byte EBCDIC page and Johab, uses a different encoding for the non-Hangul characters (using lead bytes 0x40–6C with a different layout), and uses lead bytes 0xD4–DD as a user-defined region, but uses the same Johab layout as the 1992 standard for the Hangul characters when in shift-out state. IBM number the EBCDIC-based, stateful Johab encoding Code page 1364, and also define a subset of that encoding, including fewer Hangul characters but in the same layout, as Code page 933. Some other vendors such as

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

GoldStar GoldStar was a South Korean electronics company established in 1958. The corporate name was changed to LG Electronics and LG Cable on February 28, 1995, after merging with LG Chem, Lucky Chemical. LG Cable was spun off from LG Electronics and ch ...

(now LG) used other "Johab" encodings where the mappings of five-bit codes to jamo differ from the below, consequently not being compatible with the 1992 standard Johab. The table below corresponds to the 1992 standard and also to IBM usage.

N-byte Hangul code

This is the N-byte Hangul code, as specified by KS C 5601-1974 and by annex 4 of KS C 5601–1992. The second half of IBM's Code page 1040 is a superset of this, assigning the characters ¢¬\~ (although not £) to the same locations as in Code page 1041, while the unextended N-Byte Hangul (besides C0 control code replacement graphics in some usage contexts, shared with IBM-1040) is Code page 891. Character 0x40/0xC0 is a Hangul Filler (see

), used in combining sequences. Similarly to its Japanese counterpart JIS C 6220 (JIS X 0201), N-byte Hangul code could be used as a 7-bit encoding, with character allocations over the range 0x40 through 0x7C. The chart below shows the code in an 8-bit environment with the high bit set (i.e. over 0xC0 through 0xFC), as it is used in e.g. code page 891 or 1040.

Footnotes

References

External links

What are KS X 1001(KS C 5601) and other Hangul codes?

Implementing Cross-Locale CJKV Code Conversion
by Ken Lunde * Unicode mapping tables for Wansung and Johab encodings: *
IBM code page 970 (Wansung, EUC-KR format)
*
Windows code page 949 (Unified Hangul Code / Extended Wansung)
*
Windows code page 1361 (Johab, ASCII-based version)
*
IBM code page 1364 (Johab, EBCDIC-based version)
{{Hangul Jamo Encodings of Asian languages Korean-language computing Hangul Computer-related introductions in 1987 Standards of South Korea