Windows
Compatible Applications
File Extension Details
GB2312, officially known as GB2312-80, is a character set and encoding standard for Simplified Chinese characters, primarily used in the People's Republic of China. It was established in 1980 by the Chinese National Standard to provide a standardized way to represent Chinese characters in digital systems. The encoding uses a two-byte system to represent characters, covering 6,763 Chinese characters and 682 non-Chinese characters, including Latin letters, Greek letters, Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, and Cyrillic characters. While it was the foundational standard for Chinese computing for decades, it has largely been superseded by more comprehensive encodings like GBK and the universal UTF-8 standard. Files labeled with the .gb2312 extension are typically plain text files encoded using this specific character set. Because it is a legacy encoding, modern systems often require specific locale settings or text editors that support legacy code pages to display the content correctly without 'mojibake' or garbled text. It remains historically significant as the bridge that allowed early computer systems to process and display the Chinese language.
Programs that can open and work with .gb2312 files
Compatible Applications
Compatible Applications
Compatible Applications
Mobile Applications
About .gb2312 files
To open a .gb2312 file, you need compatible software. Here are some options:
To convert a .gb2312 file to another format, you can:
Like any file type, .gb2312 files can be safe or potentially risky depending on their source:
Suggested Questions