IBM code page 936 was a character encoding for

Simplified Chinese Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to: Mathematics Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one, that is simpler (usually shorter), for example * Simplification of algebraic expressions ...

including 1880 user-defined characters (UDC). It was a combination of the single-byte Code page 903 and the double-byte Code page 928. Code page 946 used the same double-byte component, but an extended single-byte component ( Code page 1042). IBM code page 936 should not be confused with the identically numbered Windows code page, which is a variant of the GBK encoding; GBK is called

Code page 1386 Windows Code page 936 (abbreviated MS936, Windows-936 or (ambiguously) CP936), is Microsoft's character encoding for simplified Chinese, one of the four DBCSs for East Asian languages. Originally, Windows-936 covered GB 2312 (in its EUC-CN form) ...

by IBM. While GBK is a superset of the

EUC-CN Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese. The most commonly used EUC codes are variable-length encodings with a character belonging to an compliant coded chara ...

encoding of

GB 2312 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. ''GB'' refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准 ...

, IBM-936 uses a different coded form of GB 2312, more closely resembling the relationship of

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjuncti ...

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 ...

History

The encoding was in use mainly during the

1980s File:1980s replacement montage02.PNG, 420px, From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, ''Columbia'', lifts off in 1981; US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ease tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the ...

and early 1990s. While the original IBM PC ( IBM 5150) lacked functionality for processing data in CJK languages, the

IBM 5550 IBM 5550 is a personal computer series that IBM marketed in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China in the 1980s and 1990s, for business use customers. In Japan, it was introduced in 1983 and promoted as "" because it had three roles in one machine: a P ...

possessed such functionality, and was available in models supporting

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

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 ...

. Code page 936 for Simplified Chinese accompanied code page 932 (

) for Japanese, code page 934 for Korean and code page 938 for Traditional Chinese. The last revision of IBM-928/936/946 was documented in 1992, and it was superseded in 1993 by the

-based code pages 1380 through 1383; code page 1380 encodes the same characters as code page 928, but in a different layout. As of 1998, "some older Chinese packages" still included an algorithm for converting between IBM-936 and other encodings of GB 2312.

Status

Although chart definitions for Code page 1380 (the document C-H 3-3220-130 1993-11) are provided online by IBM, IBM does not similarly provide the chart definition for the older Code page 928 (the document C-H 3-3220-130 1992-11, i.e. an earlier revision of the same specification).

International Components for Unicode International Components for Unicode (ICU) is an open-source project of mature C/ C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization, and software globalization. ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environ ...

(ICU) does not include an IBM-936 or IBM-946 codec, and uses the Windows code page for the "cp936" label. The ICU project does possess mapping data for IBM-946, which it makes publicly available, but does not ship it with ICU.

Structure

Code page 928, the double byte component, included 9,355 characters as double-byte sequences starting with 0x81 through 0xAC and 0xF0 through 0xFA. The 0x81–AC lead byte range was used for GB 2312 characters: lead bytes 0x81–87 were used for non-hanzi, 0x88–9C were used for level 1 hanzi and 0x9C–AC were used for level 2 hanzi. Like

, trail (second) bytes were in the range 0x40–FC excluding 0x7F, allowing two GB 2312 rows to be encoded per lead byte; unlike Shift JIS, the bytes 0xA0–AC were not excluded from the lead byte range, since

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, altho ...

compatibility was not required. The 0xF0–FA lead byte range was used for IBM extensions: 0xF0 through 0xF9 were used for user-defined characters, and 0xFA was used for additional non-hanzi.

References

{{character encoding Encodings of Asian languages