Big-5 (Traditional Chinese)

This is a 2-byte code, designed to represent traditional Chinese characters. The first byte is A1-F9; the second byte 40-7E,A1-FE. The code ranges are:

A140-A24E
punctuation and other symbols
A24F-A258
various units
A259-A261
Chinese units
A262-A2AE
box-drawing pieces and shapes
A2AF-A2B8
Arabic numerals
A2B9-A2C2
Roman numerals
A2C3-A2CE
Hangzhou numerals
A2CF-A2E8
Latin capital letters
A2E9-A343
Latin small letters
A344-A35B
Greek capital letters
A35C-A373
Greek small letters
A374-A3BA
zhuyin symbols
A3BB-A3BF
zhuyin diacritics
A440-C67E
frequently used hanzi (5401)
C6A1-C6F7
hiragana
C6F8-C7B0
katakana
C7B1-C7E8
Cyrillic letters
C7E9-C7F2
circled numbers
C7F3-C7FC
parenthesized numbers
C940-F9D5
less frequently used hanzi (7652)

Each of the hanzi blocks is ordered by total number of strokes, then Kangxi radical no.

A variant is the Taiwan standard CNS-11643.

The font HKU-Ch16 (a.k.a. chinese.16) uses a slight variant: the less frequent hanzi are moved down to occupy C6A1-F755.

The usual encoding is a simple interleaving with plain US-ASCII text.


Part of Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings.