In computing, JIS encoding refers to several Japanese Industrial Standards for encoding the Japanese language. Strictly speaking, the term means either: In practice, "JIS encoding" usually refers to JIS X 0208 character data encoded with JIS X 0202. For instance, the IANA uses the label to refer to JIS X 0202, and the 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 (such as cash register 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 (UCS coded characters), particularly in the UTF-8 encoding mechanism.

Encoding comparison

The following table compares the features of the three main encoding schemes for JIS X 0208.