JIS X 0201

JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic 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 full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合).

The first 96 codes comprise an ASCII variant, while the second 96 character codes represent the phonetic Japanese katakana signs. Since the encoding does not provide any way to express hiragana or kanji, it is only capable of expressing simplified written Japanese. Nevertheless, it is possible to express, at least phonetically, the full range of sounds in the language. In the 1980s, this was acceptable for media such as text mode computer terminals, telegrams, receipts or other electronically handled data.

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

The first 96 codes in JIS comprise a Japanese variant of ISO 646, or ASCII with backslash (\) and tilde (~) replaced by yen (¥) and overline (‾), while the second 96 codes consist mainly of katakana. Control characters are specified in JIS X 0211.

The substitution of the yen symbol for backslash can make paths on DOS and Windows-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");.

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