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# GBK Text Codec

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GBK has been superseded by the new Chinese national standard GB 18030-2000, which added a 4-byte encoding while remaining compatible with GB2312 and GBK.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

The copyright notice for their code follows:Copyright (C) 2000 TurboLinux, Inc. Written by Justin Yu and Sean Chen.
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 Turbolinux, Inc. Written by James Su.
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 ThizLinux Laboratory Ltd. Written by Anthony Fok.Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.