BIG5(5)                   FreeBSD File Formats Manual                  BIG5(5)

NAME
     big5 - "Big Five" encoding for Traditional Chinese text

SYNOPSIS
     ENCODING "BIG5"

DESCRIPTION
     "Big Five" is a standard for encoding Traditional Chinese text.  Each
     character is represented by either one or two bytes.  Characters from the
     ASCII character set are represented as single bytes in the range 0x00 -
     0x7F.  Traditional Chinese characters are represented by two bytes: the
     first in the range 0xA1 - 0xFE, the second in the range 0x40 - 0xFE.

SEE ALSO
     euc(5), gb18030(5), utf8(5)

BUGS
     The range of the second byte overlaps some ASCII characters, including
     0x5C (`\') and 0x7C (`|') which may cause problems in program execution
     or display.  Big5 is considered a legacy standard and only preserved for
     backward compatibility reason.  New documents and systems are suggested
     using UTF-8 directly.

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6          April 1, 2020         FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6