Characters are represented by double-byte, except that the highest bit is set to 1 for distinguishing Chinese.
As for the UTF-8 encoding, which is used to solve the international character of a multibyte encoding, it uses 8 bits (that is, one byte) in English, the Chinese use 24 bits (three bytes) to encode. For forums with more English characters, you can save space with UTF-8.
The GBK contains all the Chinese characters, and UTF-8 contains all the symbols that are needed in all countries of the world.
GBK is in the national standard GB2312 based on the expansion of compatible GB2312 standards (as if not national standards) UTF-8 encoded text can be displayed in various countries support UTF8 character set browser. For example, if it is a UTF8 code, it can display Chinese in the foreigner's English ie, without requiring them to download IE's Chinese language support package. Therefore, for the more English forum, use GBK each character occupies 2 bytes, and the use of UTF-8 English is only a single byte.
UTF8 is an international code, its versatility is better, foreigners can also browse the forum, GBK is the country code, the commonality than UTF8 difference
What is the difference between the GKB version and the UTF-8 version (reprint)
