Network Working Group Y. Wei Request for Comments: 1842 AsiaInfo Services Inc. Category: Informational Y. Zhang Harvard Univ. J. Li Rice Univ. J. Ding AsiaInfo Services Inc. Y. Jiang Univ. of Maryland August 1995 ASCII Printable Characters-Based Chinese Character Encoding for Internet Messages Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This document describes the encoding used in electronic mail [RFC 822] and network news [RFC 1036] messages over the Internet. The 7-bit representation of GB 2312 Chinese text was specified by Fung Fung Lee of Stanford University [Lee89] and implemented in various software packages under different platforms (see appendix for a partial list of the available software packages that support this encoding method). It is further tested and used in the usenet newsgroups alt.chinese.text and chinese.* as well as various other network forums with considerable success. Future extensions of this encoding method can accommodate additional GB character sets and other east asian language character sets [Wei94]. The name given to this encoding is "HZ-GB-2312", which is intended to be used in the "charset" parameter field of MIME headers (see [MIME1] and [MIME2]). Wei, et al Informational