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U+4E00..U+9FFF is part of the complete set, but not all

ah bon
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omg
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    I would just link a wikipedia article here as the block range would update from time to time thus it is better to link something dynamically changing ratger tgan giving a static answer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs – user930067 Jun 20 '15 at 04:18

7 Answers7

111

May be you would find a complete list through the CJK Unicode FAQ (which does include "Chinese, Japanese, and Korean" characters)

The "East Asian Script" document does mention:

Blocks Containing Han Ideographs

Han ideographic characters are found in five main blocks of the Unicode Standard, as shown in Table 12-2

Table 12-2. Blocks Containing Han Ideographs

Block                                   Range       Comment
CJK Unified Ideographs                  4E00-9FFF   Common
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A      3400-4DBF   Rare
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B      20000-2A6DF Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C      2A700–2B73F Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D      2B740–2B81F Uncommon, some in current use
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E      2B820–2CEAF Rare, historic
CJK Compatibility Ideographs            F900-FAFF   Duplicates, unifiable variants, corporate characters
CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement 2F800-2FA1F Unifiable variants

Note: the block ranges can evolve over time: latest is in CJK Unified Ideographs.

See also Wikipedia:

Community
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VonC
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  • You might also want to include U+AC00 – U+D7AF (Hangul Syllables). – Flimm Apr 01 '13 at 18:07
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    @Flimm: Hangul is not part of the Chinese standard; Hangul is Korean. Korean language *does* uses Hanja ("Chinese script"), but scarcely and only for some traditional things (like last-names, monuments, places...) which can't be transcribed in Hangul. The OP asked about Chinese specifically, so there was no need for the Responder to include Hangul. :-) – omninonsense Dec 24 '13 at 20:41
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    List seems to not cover punctuation ("。"). – Michał Woliński May 19 '16 at 13:55
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    @MichałWoliński [CJK Symbols and Punctuation](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/cjk_symbols_and_punctuation/index.htm) range is 3000-303F – Mariano Oct 18 '16 at 10:39
  • I learned that CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A is from 3400 to 4dbf rather than 3400 to 4dff. – Lerner Zhang Dec 15 '16 at 02:11
  • @Lerner Thank you. I have fixed that range, and added wikipedia link for illustrating the complete content. – VonC Dec 15 '16 at 05:36
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Unicode currently has 74605 CJK characters. CJK characters not only includes characters used by Chinese, but also Japanese Kanji, Korean Hanja, and Vietnamese Chu Nom. Some CJK characters are not Chinese characters.

1) 20941 characters from the CJK Unified Ideographs block.

Code points U+4E00 to U+9FCC.

  1. U+4E00 - U+62FF
  2. U+6300 - U+77FF
  3. U+7800 - U+8CFF
  4. U+8D00 - U+9FCC

2) 6582 characters from the CJKUI Ext A block.

Code points U+3400 to U+4DB5. Unicode 3.0 (1999).

3) 42711 characters from the CJKUI Ext B block.

Code points U+20000 to U+2A6D6. Unicode 3.1 (2001).

  1. U+20000 - U+215FF
  2. U+21600 - U+230FF
  3. U+23100 - U+245FF
  4. U+24600 - U+260FF
  5. U+26100 - U+275FF
  6. U+27600 - U+290FF
  7. U+29100 - U+2A6DF

3) 4149 characters from the CJKUI Ext C block.

Code points U+2A700 to U+2B734. Unicode 5.2 (2009).

4) 222 characters from the CJKUI Ext D block.

Code points U+2B740 to U+2B81D. Unicode 6.0 (2010).

5) CJKUI Ext E block.

Coming soon

If the above is not spaghetti enough, take a look at known issues. Have fun =)

Pacerier
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    Hi, can you give an example of a CJK ideograph (preferably from the basic plane) that is not a Chinese character? I thought that characters from other languages (Japanese, Korean) which are not also Chinese characters appear in another block (for example the Hangul Jamo block, in the case of Korean)... – Adam Burley Feb 02 '17 at 23:35
  • Try looking at 'Gukja', 'Kokuji', and 'Chữ Nôm'. U+4E44, 乄, is a Japanese-only CJK character. – Ṃųỻịgǻňạcểơửṩ Nov 22 '19 at 15:30
  • It seems that in recent years, CJKUI Ext B block has grown by 9 characters to 42720 with versions 13.0 and 14.0. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs_Extension_B – Ben Mares Oct 13 '21 at 19:23
27

The exact ranges for Chinese characters (except the extensions) are [\u2E80-\u2FD5\u3190-\u319f\u3400-\u4DBF\u4E00-\u9FCC\uF900-\uFAAD].

  1. [\u2e80-\u2fd5]

CJK Radicals Supplement is a Unicode block containing alternative, often positional, forms of the Kangxi radicals. They are used headers in dictionary indices and other CJK ideograph collections organized by radical-stroke.

  1. [\u3190-\u319f]

Kanbun is a Unicode block containing annotation characters used in Japanese copies of classical Chinese texts, to indicate reading order.

  1. [\u3400-\u4DBF]

CJK Unified Ideographs Extension-A is a Unicode block containing rare Han ideographs.

  1. [\u4E00-\u9FCC]

CJK Unified Ideographs is a Unicode block containing the most common CJK ideographs used in modern Chinese and Japanese.

  1. [\uF900-\uFAAD]

CJK Compatibility Ideographs is a Unicode block created to contain Han characters that were encoded in multiple locations in other established character encodings, in addition to their CJK Unified Ideographs assignments, in order to retain round-trip compatibility between Unicode and those encodings.

For the details please refer to here, and the extensions are provided in other answers.

Lerner Zhang
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  • Could the one who has downvoted this answer please tell me the reason? – Lerner Zhang Feb 27 '17 at 06:52
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    I didn't downvote, but what about extension B, C, D, and E? – Suragch Feb 27 '17 at 07:35
  • @Suragch Those extensions have been provided correctly in other answers, hence there is no need for me to rewrite it. I only clearly separated the ranges in between. – Lerner Zhang Feb 27 '17 at 08:48
  • 1. range of CJK Radicals Supplement is 2E80—2EFF 2.Kangxi Radicals is not Chinese characters, it's graphical component of a Chinese charaters, it are used specially to express radicals, .e.g. ⼻(U+2F3B) and 彳(U+5F73), ⻜(U+2EDC) and 飞 (U+98DE) 3. If you think kanbun are chinese chars, why not CJK Compatibility Ideographs? Why not Enclosed CJK Letters and Months? – Voyager Mar 13 '19 at 03:12
  • @rambler Thanks for your advice. I think when we process Chinses character we should consider Kangxi Radicals and Kanbun. CJK compatibility ideographs are good but enclosed CJK letters and months are too rare and I don't think we should consider them. – Lerner Zhang Mar 13 '19 at 13:36
12

Unicode version 11.0.0

In Unicode the Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters.

These ranges often contain non-assigned or reserved code points(such as U+2E9A , U+2EF4 - 2EFF),

Chinese characters

bottom  top     reference (also have a look at wiki page)   block name
4E00    9FEF    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U4E00.pdf CJK Unified Ideographs
3400    4DBF    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3400.pdf CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A
20000   2A6DF   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20000.pdf    CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B
2A700   2B73F   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2A700.pdf    CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C
2B740   2B81F   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2B740.pdf    CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D
2B820   2CEAF   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2B820.pdf    CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E
2CEB0   2EBEF   https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2CEB0.pdf   CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F
3007    3007    https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%80%87    in block CJK Symbols and Punctuation
                
  • In CJK Unified Ideographs block, I notice many answers use upper bound 9FCC, but U+9FCD(鿍) is indeed a Chinese char. And all characters in this block are Chinese characters (also used in Japanese or Korean etc.).
  • Most of characters in CJK Unified Ideographs Ext (Except Ext F, only 17% in Ext F are Chinese characters), are traditional Chinese characters, which are rarely used in China.
  • 〇 is the Chinese character form of zero and still in use today

Therefore the range is

[0x3007,0x3007],[0x3400,0x4DBF],[0x4E00,0x9FEF],[0x20000,0x2EBFF]

CJK characters but never used in Chinese

They are Common Han used only for compatibility.

It is almost impossible to see them appear in any Chinese books, articles, writings etc.

All characters here have one corresponding glyph-identical Chinese character, such as 金(U+F90A) and 金(U+91D1), they are identical glyphs.

 F900    FAFF   https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UF900.pdf  CJK Compatibility Ideographs
2F800   2FA1F   https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2F800.pdf CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement

CJK related symbols

2E80    2EFF    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2E80.pdf CJK Radicals Supplement
            
2F00    2FDF    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2F00.pdf Kangxi Radicals 
2FF0    2FFF    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2FF0.pdf    Ideographic Description Character
3000    303F    https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf    CJK Symbols and Punctuation
3100    312f    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3100.pdf    Bopomofo
31A0    31BF    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U31A0.pdf    Bopomofo Extended
31C0    31EF    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U31C0.pdf CJK Strokes
3200    32FF    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3200.pdf    Enclosed CJK Letters and Months
3300    33FF    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3300.pdf    CJK Compatibility
FE30    FE4F    https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFE30.pdf    CJK Compatibility Forms
FF00    FFEF    https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf    Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
1F200   1F2FF   https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F200.pdf   Enclosed Ideographic Supplement
  • some blocks such as Hangul Compatibility Jamo are excluded because of no relation to Chinese.
  • Kangxi Radicals is not Chinese characters, they are graphical components of Chinese characters, used specially to express radicals, .e.g. ⼻(U+2F3B) and 彳(U+5F73), ⻜(U+2EDC) and 飞 (U+98DE)

Other common punctuation appearing in Chinese

This is a wide range, some punctuation may be never used, some punctuations such as ……”“ are used so much in Chinese.

0000    007F    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf    C0 Controls and Basic Latin 
2000    206F    https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf    General Punctuation
……

There are also many Chinese-related symbols, such as Yijing Hexagram Symbols or Kanbun, but it's off-topic anyway. I write non-chinese-characters in CJK to have a better explanation of what Chinese characters are. And the ranges above already cover almost all the characters which appear in Chinese writing except math and other specialty notation.

Supplementary

CJK Symbols and Punctuation

 、。〃〄々〆〇〈〉《》「」『』【】〒〓〔〕〖〗〘〙〚〛〜〝〞〟〠〡〢〣〤〥〦〧〨〩〪〭〮〯〫〬〰〱〲〳〴〵〶〷〸〹〺〻〼〽 〾 〿

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~⦅⦆。「」、・ヲァィゥェォャュョッーアイウエオカキクケコサシスセソタチツテトナニヌネノハヒフヘホマミムメモヤユヨラリルレロワン゙゚ᄀᄁᆪᄂᆬᆭᄃᄄᄅᆰᆱᆲᆳᆴᆵᄚᄆᄇᄈᄡᄉᄊᄋᄌᄍᄎᄏᄐᄑ하ᅢᅣᅤᅥᅦᅧᅨᅩᅪᅫᅬᅭᅮᅯᅰᅱᅲᅳᅴᅵ¢£¬ ̄¦¥₩│←↑→↓■○

Refer

  1. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89%E5%AD%97 (in chinese language, notice the right side bar)
  2. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%97%A5%E9%9F%93%E7%9B%B8%E5%AE%B9%E8%A1%A8%E6%84%8F%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97 (notice the bottom table)
  3. http://www.unicode.org
tripleee
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Voyager
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2

The Unicode code blocks that the others answers gave certainly cover most of the Chinese Unicode characters, but check out some of these other code blocks, too.

CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS
CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS_EXTENSION_A
CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS_EXTENSION_B
CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS_EXTENSION_C
CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS_EXTENSION_D
CJK_UNIFIED_IDEOGRAPHS_EXTENSION_E
CJK_COMPATIBILITY
CJK_COMPATIBILITY_FORMS
CJK_COMPATIBILITY_IDEOGRAPHS
CJK_COMPATIBILITY_IDEOGRAPHS_SUPPLEMENT
CJK_RADICALS_SUPPLEMENT
CJK_STROKES
CJK_SYMBOLS_AND_PUNCTUATION
ENCLOSED_CJK_LETTERS_AND_MONTHS
ENCLOSED_IDEOGRAPHIC_SUPPLEMENT
KANGXI_RADICALS
IDEOGRAPHIC_DESCRIPTION_CHARACTERS

See my fuller discussion here. And this site is convenient for browsing Unicode.

Community
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Suragch
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Unicode continually evolves, with the current goal to have "A new major version of the standard will be released each year. Starting with Unicode 14.0, each of those releases is targeted for the third quarter of each year."

Without a single community wiki that someone regularly updates, if you want to maintain coverage for corrections and additional extensions, to stay up-to-date be sure to also double check the latest standard, always found at: https://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/ And look for the East Asia chapter (unless that one day gets split as well).

As of this initial writing, the latest is v14, and Ch 18 "presents scripts used in East Asia. This includes major writing systems associated with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It also includes several scripts for minority languages". The first table reviews Blocks Containing Han Ideographs where we see they've gone up to Extension G:

Block                                   Range       Comment
-----------------------------------------------------------
CJK Unified Ideographs                  4E00–9FFF   Common
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A      3400–4DBF   Rare
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B      20000–2A6DF Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C      2A700–2B73F Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D      2B740–2B81F Uncommon, some in current use
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E      2B820–2CEAF Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F      2CEB0–2EBEF Rare, historic
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G      30000–3134F Rare, historic
CJK Compatibility Ideographs            F900–FAFF   Duplicates, unifiable variants, corporate characters
CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement 2F800–2FA1F Unifiable variants

The second table Small Extensions to CJK Blocks notes additions: "The repertoire in the CJK Unified Ideographs block has subsequently been extended with small sets of unified ideographs or ideographic components needed for interoperability with various standards, or for other reasons, as shown in Table 18-2", some of which "have involved reserved ranges at the end of other CJK blocks."

For additional related blocks such as punctuation and other syllabaries (including for J+K) which should be more stable, check out that unicode chapter further as well as other answers around here, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Unicode_ranges. https://blog.miniasp.com/post/2019/01/02/Common-Regex-patterns-for-Unicode-characters has some interesting discussion as well even though it was written in 2019.

For fonts that try to render these, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts, but note that coverage information is sparse. You'll have to dig around to see those details, e.g. Adobe/Google's Source Han/Noto fonts don't cover all extensions or compatibility ideographs.

qix
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To summarize, it sounds like these are them:

var blocks = [
  [0x3400, 0x4DB5],
  [0x4E00, 0x62FF],
  [0x6300, 0x77FF],
  [0x7800, 0x8CFF],
  [0x8D00, 0x9FCC],
  [0x2e80, 0x2fd5],
  [0x3190, 0x319f],
  [0x3400, 0x4DBF],
  [0x4E00, 0x9FCC],
  [0xF900, 0xFAAD],
  [0x20000, 0x215FF],
  [0x21600, 0x230FF],
  [0x23100, 0x245FF],
  [0x24600, 0x260FF],
  [0x26100, 0x275FF],
  [0x27600, 0x290FF],
  [0x29100, 0x2A6DF],
  [0x2A700, 0x2B734],
  [0x2B740, 0x2B81D]
]
Lance
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