JIS encoding
In computing, JIS encoding refers to several Japanese Industrial Standards for encoding the Japanese language. Strictly speaking, the term means either:
- A set of standard coded character sets for Japanese, notably:
- * JIS X 0201, the Japanese version of ISO 646 containing the base 7-bit ASCII characters and 64 half-width katakana characters.
- * JIS X 0208, the most common kanji character set containing 6,879 characters, including 6,355 kanji and 524 other characters
- * JIS X 0212, a supplement for JIS X 0208 which adds 5,801 kanji, totaling 12,156 kanji
- * JIS X 0213, which extends JIS X 0208
- JIS X 0202, a set of encoding mechanisms for sending JIS character data over transmission media that only support 7-bit data.
JIS_Encoding label to refer to JIS X 0202, and the ISO-2022-JP label to refer to the profile thereof defined by.Other encoding mechanisms for JIS characters include the Shift JIS encoding and EUC-JP. Shift JIS adds the kanji, full-width hiragana and full-width katakana from JIS X 0208 to JIS X 0201 in a backward compatible way. Shift JIS is perhaps the most widely used encoding in Japan, as the compatibility with the single-byte JIS X 0201 character set made it possible for electronic equipment manufacturers to offer an upgrade from older cheaper equipment that was not capable of displaying kanji to newer equipment while retaining character-set compatibility.
EUC-JP is used on UNIX systems, where the JIS encodings are incompatible with POSIX standards.
A more recent alternative to JIS coded characters is Unicode, particularly in the UTF-8 encoding mechanism.