Code page 936 (IBM)


IBM code page 936 was a character encoding for Simplified Chinese including 1880 UDC. It was a combination of the single-byte Code page 903 and the double-byte Code page 928.
Code page 928, the double byte component, included 9,355 characters as double-byte sequences starting with 0x81 through 0xAC and 0xF0 through 0xFA. It was documented in 1992 and superseded in 1993 by Code page 1380, encoding the same characters in a different layout. Documentation for Code page 1380 is provided online by IBM, whereas IBM do not similarly provide the documentation for the older Code page 928 and suggest contacting them for more information.
IBM code page 936 should not be confused with the identically numbered Windows code page, which is a variant of the GBK encoding and is called Code page 1386 by IBM. International Components for Unicode does not include an IBM-936 codec, and uses the Windows code page for the "cp936" label.