Chinese Commercial Code mapping library

Setup

    dependencies {
        implementation 'io.hkhc.ccc:ccc:1.0'
    }

Introduction

Before the computer-era, people send textual message all over the world with telegraph. It is straight forward to send messages in English alphabets. Not so for Chinese characters. People invented a coding system to encode most frequently used Chinese characters in 4-digit code. It is known as Chinese Commercial Code. It is not friendly for data input, but very space efficient, which is far more valuable in the old days.

Nowaday we have better coding system for Chinese characters, as part of Unicode system. However the Chinese Commercial Code system is still in use today, to specify the legal name of people in Hong Kong Identity Card (HKID) and passport. The corresponding Chinese Commercial Code of the Chinese name is printed on the documents. It helps non-Chinese law enforcement agencies to recognize the Chinese name of people on the documents. It also help HKID data collections with camera by recognize digits rather than Chinese characters.

However, mapping between Chinese characters and Chinese Commercial Codes is not a commmon facility of modern programming platform. This library fills the gap for applications that have this needs.

Note that mapping between Chinese characters and Chinese Commercial Code is not one-to-one. One code may represents different Chinese characters, and it is not entirely rare. Most of the time the traditional Chinese version and the Simplified Chinese version of the same character are mapped to the same code. So it is not practical to map the code back to Chinese characters mechanically. But it is mostly good enough for person name identificaation purpose. It is also possible that a Chinese character (available in Unicode) and no mapping in Chinese Commercial Code. There are much more characters for 4-digit coding system.

Examples

        CCCDB db = new CCCDB();
        db.load();
        Assert.assertEquals("7115 1129 2429", db.getCCCs("陳大文"));

If the Chinese characters has no corresponding Chinese Commercial Code, the result would be "0000'.

Source data

Source data for the mapping files are placed under data folder. The encoding mapping file is generated by CCCGenerator class.

Building the library

It is a trivial piece of code to build with Gradle. The deployment of the library to MavenCentral is done by my another project Jarbird. But it is undergoing major update, stay tuned.