Chinese Text

Chinese usually consists entirely of characters from the ideographic script called Hanzi. In the People's Republic of China (PRC) there are about 7000 commonly used Hanzi characters in GB2312 (zh locale) and more than 20,000 characters in the GBK (zh.GBK) locale. In Taiwan, current standards require more than 13000 characters; 6000 others have been recently standardized but are considered rare.

If a character is not a root character, it usually consists of two or more parts, two being most common. In two-part characters, one part generally represents meaning, and the other represents pronunciation. Occasionally both parts represent meaning. The radical is the most important element, and characters are traditionally arranged by radical, of which there are several hundred. A single sound can be represented by many different characters, which are not interchangeable in usage. A single character can have different sounds.

Some characters are more appropriate than others in a given context--the appropriate one is distinguished phonetically by the use of tones. By contrast, spoken Japanese and Korean lack tones.

Several phonetic systems represent Chinese. In the People's Republic of China the most common is pinyin, which uses roman characters and is widely employed in the West for place names such as Beijing. The Wade-Giles system is an older phonetic system, formerly used for place names such as Peking. In Taiwan zhuyin (or bopomofo), a phonetic alphabet with unique letter forms, is often used instead.

Commercial applications, particularly those that deal with people's names, need to consider the impact of codeset expansion. Many Chinese people have names containing characters that do not exist in any standard codeset. You need to provide space in unassigned codesets to deal with this issue.