| 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 character encoding[1] 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.[2]
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.