Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

39

  JIS X 0208 1983 (new JIS) (ESC 0x24 0x42).

Note that JIS X 0208 1978 and JIS X 0208 1983 are almost identical and ASCII and JIS X 0201 1976

Roman are also almost identical. A line (stream of bytes between 'newline' control code) must

start by ASCII status and to end by ASCII status. See `ISO 2022' on page

18

for detail.

ISO 2022 JP 2 (RFC 1554) is a subset of 7bit version of ISO 2022 and superset of ISO 2022 JP.

Difference between ISO 2022 JP and ISO 2022 JP 2 is that ISO 2022 JP 2 has more coded character

sets than ISO 2022 JP. Character sets included in ISO 2022 JP 2 are:

  ASCII (ESC 0x28 0x42)

  JIS X 0201 1976 Roman (ESC 0x28 0x4a),

  JIS X 0208 1978 (old JIS) (ESC 0x24 0x40),

  JIS X 0208 1983 (new JIS) (ESC 0x24 0x42),

  GB2312 80 (simplified Chinese) (ESC 0x24 0x41),

  KS C 5601 (Korean) (ESC 0x24 0x28 0x43),

  JIS X 0212 1990 (ESC 0x24 0x28 0x44),

  ISO 8859 1 (Latin 1) (ESC 0x2e 0x41), and

  ISO 8859 7 (Greek) (ESC 0x2e 0x46).

Though JIS X 0212 1990 may sometimes be used, ISO 2022 JP 2 is rarely used.

ISO 2022 INT 1 is a superset of ISO 2022 JP 2 which has CNS 11643 1986 1 and CNS 11643 1986 2

(traditional Chinese).

EUC JP is a version of EUC, where G0 is ASCII, G1 is JIS X 0208, G2 is JIS X 0201 Kana, and G3

is JIS X 0212. G2 and G3 are sometimes not implemented. This is the most popular encoding for

Linux/Unix. See `EUC (Extended Unix Code)' on page

21

for detail.

SHIFT JIS is designed to be a superset of encodings for old 8bit computers which includes JIS X

0201 Roman and JIS X 0201 Kana.

0x20

0x7f

is JIS X 0201 Roman and

0xa0

0xdf

is JIS X 0201

Kana.

0x80

0x9f

and

0xe0

0xff

is the first byte of doublebyte characters. The second byte is

0x40

0x7e

and

0x80

0xfc

. This code space is used for JIS X 0208.

UNICODE is not popular in Japan at all, probably because conversion from these codes into Uni 

code is a bit difficult. However MS Windows uses Unicode in a limited field, for example, internal

code for file names. I guess more and more softwares will come to support Unicode in the future.

You can convert files written in these encodings one another using

nkf

or

kcc

package. Using

options

 j

,

 s

, and

 e

,

nkf

convert a file into ISO 2022 JP (aka JIS), SHIFT JIS (aka MS KANJI),