The GBK codec provides conversion to and from the Chinese GB18030/GBK/GB2312 encoding.

GBK, formally the Chinese Internal Code Specification, is a commonly used extension of GB 2312-80. Microsoft Windows uses it under the name codepage 936.

GBK has been superseded by the new Chinese national standard GB 18030-2000, which added a 4-byte encoding while remaining compatible with GB2312 and GBK. The new GB 18030-2000 may be described as a special encoding of Unicode 3.x and ISO-10646-1.

Special thanks to charset gurus Markus Scherer (IBM), Dirk Meyer (Adobe Systems) and Ken Lunde (Adobe Systems) for publishing an excellent GB 18030-2000 summary and specification on the Internet. Some must-read documents are:

• ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/examples/nutshell/cjkv/pdf/GB18030_Summary.pdf
• http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/charset/source/gb18030/gb18030.html
• http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/charset/data/xml/gb-18030-2000.xml

The GBK codec was contributed to Qt by Justin Yu <justiny@turbolinux.com.cn> and Sean Chen <seanc@turbolinux.com.cn>. They may also be reached at Yu Mingjian <yumj@sun.ihep.ac.cn>, <yumingjian@china.com> Chen Xiangyang <chenxy@sun.ihep.ac.cn>

The GB18030 codec Qt functions were contributed to Qt by James Su <suzhe@gnuchina.org>, <suzhe@turbolinux.com.cn> who pioneered much of GB18030 development on GNU/Linux systems.

The GB18030 codec was contributed to Qt by Anthony Fok <anthony@thizlinux.com>, <foka@debian.org> using a Perl script to generate C++ tables from gb-18030-2000.xml while merging contributions from James Su, Justin Yu and Sean Chen. A copy of the source Perl script is available at http://people.debian.org/~foka/gb18030/gen-qgb18030codec.pl