Perl 5.7.3 and later ships with an adequate set of chinese encodings, including the commonly used cp950, cp936 (also known as gbk), big5 (alias for big5-eten), big5-hkscs, euc-cn, hz, and iso-ir-165. however, the numbers of chinese encodings are staggering, and a complete coverage will easily increase the size of perl distribution by several megabytes; hence, this module tries to provide the rest of them. if you are using perl 5.8 or later, encode::cn and encode::tw will automatically load the extra encodings for you, so there's no need to explicitly write "use encode::hanextra" if you are using one of them already.