Hi Michael
Yeah, that's a good point. I would also question what's the benefit
in using GB18030 over UTF-8, though. An obvious one I can see is
because legacy applications never get updated.
The GB18030 encoding standard is a mandatory Chinese character encoding standard required by regulations. Software sold and used in China must support GB18030, with its latest version being the 2023 edition. The primary advantage of GB18030 is that most Chinese characters require only 2 bytes for storage, whereas UTF-8 necessitates 3 bytes for the same characters. This makes GB18030 significantly more storage-efficient compared to UTF-8 in terms of space utilization.
Tony
