big5(5)

big55

“big five” encoding for traditional chinese text

Usage

ENCODING "BIG5"

Overview

“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.

Releases

54 releases since FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE; the text changed 33 times.

  1. 5.2–5.2.1
  2. 5.3–6.3
  3. 6.4
  4. 7.0
  5. 7.1
  6. 7.2
  7. 7.3
  8. 7.4
  9. 8.0
  10. 8.1
  11. 8.2
  12. 8.3
  13. 8.4
  14. 9.0
  15. 9.1
  16. 9.2
  17. 9.3
  18. 10.0
  19. 10.1
  20. 10.2
  21. 10.3
  22. 10.4
  23. 11.0
  24. 11.1
  25. 11.2
  26. 11.3
  27. 11.4
  28. 12.0
  29. 12.1
  30. 12.2
  31. 12.3
  32. 12.4
  33. 13.0–13.2
  34. 13.3–16.0

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.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.