HZ (character encoding)
The HZ character encoding is an encoding of GB 2312 that was formerly commonly used in email and USENET postings. It was designed in 1989 by Fung Fung Lee (Chinese: 李楓峰) of Stanford University, and subsequently codified in 1995 into RFC 1843.
| MIME / IANA | HZ-GB-2312 |
|---|---|
| Language(s) | Simplified Chinese, English, Russian |
| Created by | Fung Fung Lee |
| Standard | RFC 1843 |
| Classification | CJK encoding, ASCII armor, variable-width encoding, stateful encoding |
| Transforms / Encodes | GB 2312 |
| Preceded by | zW |
| Succeeded by | Quoted-printable, UTF-7, 8BITMIME |
The HZ, short for Hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字; lit. 'Chinese Characters'), encoding was invented to facilitate the use of Chinese characters through e-mail, which at that time only allowed 7-bit characters. Therefore, in lieu of standard ISO 2022 escape sequences (as in the case of ISO-2022-JP) or 8-bit characters (as in the case of EUC), the HZ code uses only printable, 7-bit characters to represent Chinese characters.
It was also popular in USENET networks, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s, generally did not allow transmission of 8-bit characters or escape characters.