This section provides a quick introduction of EUC-JP encoding, which maps a JIS X0208 character to a 2-byte sequence by adding 128 (0x80) to both bytes of the character's code value.
EUC-JP (Extended Unix Code for Japanese):
An encoding for JIS X0208 character set. It is an 8-bit encoding with 1 or 2 bytes per character:
Number Of Valid Range
Bytes Byte 1 Byte 2
1 0x21 - 0x7F
2 0xA1 - 0xFE 0xA1 - 0xFE
Of course, 1-byte encoding sequences are used for ASCII characters.
2-byte encoding sequences are used for JIS X0208 characters. The mapping schema is simple.
The first byte of a encoding sequence is the high byte value of the character code value plus 128 (0x80).
The second byte of a encoding sequence is the low byte value of the character code value plus 128 (0x80).
In another word, EUC-JP encoding maps a JIS X0208 character to a 2-byte sequence with both byte
values in the range of from 0xA1 to 0xFE, as shown in the picture below:
The advantage of EUC-JP encoding is that ASCII characters and JIS X0208 characters can be mixed
together without using any escape sequences.
The disadvantage of EUC-JP encoding is that it uses 8-bit bytes, which are not safe to transmit
through many communication interfaces.
