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 character sets for Japanese, notably:
  • JIS X 0201, the Japanese version of ISO 646 (ASCII)
  • JIS X 0208, the most common kanji character set containing 6,879 kanji

• JIS X 0202 (also known as ISO-2022-JP), a set of encoding mechanisms for sending JIS data over transmission mediums that only support 7-bit data.

In practice, "JIS encoding" usually refers to JIS X 0208 data encoded with JIS X 0202.

There is also the Shift_JIS encoding, which is based on ISO-2022-JP, but with most byte values shifted to accommodate an additional 64 katakana characters

The main alternative to JIS encoding is Unicode, in the form of UTF-8.