JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard

Japanese Industrial Standards

Japanese Industrial Standards specifies the standards used for industrial activities in Japan.The standardization process is coordinated by Japanese Industrial Standards Committee and published through Japanese Standards Association.-History:...

 developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese character set to become widely used. It is either 7-bit encoding or 8-bit encoding, although 8-bit encoding is dominant for modern use. The name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange .

For 7-bit encoding, there are 128 potential codes, but two 96 graphic character

Graphic character

In ISO/IEC 646 and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise displayed in a form that can be read by humans...

 sets can be selected with Shift Out and Shift In characters

Shift Out and Shift In characters

Shift Out and Shift In are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively .  The original meaning of those characters was to switch to a different character set and back.  This was used, for instance, in the Russian character set known as KOI7, where SO starts printing Russian...

. For 8-bit encoding, it yields 256 potential codes combining two graphic character sets. The first 96 codes comprise a Japanese variant of ISO 646

ISO/IEC 646

ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO standard that since its first edition in 1972 has specified a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived...

, or ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 with backslash

Backslash

The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It was first introduced to computers in 1960 by Bob Bemer. Sometimes called a reverse solidus or a slosh, it is the mirror image of the common slash....

 (\) and tilde

Tilde

The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....

 (~) replaced by yen (¥) and overline

Overline

An overline or overbar or overscore , refers to the typographical feature of a line drawn immediately above the text, for example used to indicate medieval sigla. Specifically, a line drawn over one symbol is a macron, and a line over a collection of symbols is a vinculum...

 (‾), while the second 96 codes consist mainly of katakana

Katakana

is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...

. Control character

Control character

In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point in a character set, that does not in itself represent a written symbol.It is in-band signaling in the context of character encoding....

s are specified in JIS X 0211

JIS X 0211

JIS X 0211 from 1994 is a derivative of ISO/IEC 6429, however, it doesn't feature all the codes presently in ISO/IEC 6429.-Codepage layout:-References:**...

. Note that this standard does not define any way to encode kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

.

JIS X 0201 was supplanted by subsequent encodings such as Shift JIS (which combines this standard and JIS X 0208

JIS X 0208

JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. The official title of the current standard is...

) and later Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

.

The substitution of the yen symbol for backslash can make paths on DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

 and Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

-based computers with Japanese support display strangely, like "C:¥Program Files¥", for example. Another similar problem is C programming language's control characters of string literals, like printf("Hello, world.¥n");.

Codepage layout

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External links

• JIS X 0201 diagram