EUC-JP

Extended Unix Code for Japanese. Variable-width encoding common in Unix/Linux Japanese environments and older web pages.

EUC-JP
Variable (1–3 bytes)
1991

Byte Structure

EUC-JP uses variable-width encoding (1–3 bytes per character). Characters not in this encoding cannot be represented and must be replaced or transliterated.

When to Use EUC-JP

EUC-JP was the dominant encoding for Japanese on Unix/Linux systems and older web servers. You'll encounter it when processing legacy Japanese Unix content, emails, or Usenet archives. Modern Japanese applications use UTF-8.

Sample Characters in EUC-JP

The table below shows how a selection of characters are represented in EUC-JP. Bytes are shown in hexadecimal. Characters marked "not supported" cannot be encoded in EUC-JP and would need to be replaced or transliterated when converting from Unicode.

Character Codepoint Name Bytes (Hex) Bytes (Decimal) Supported
A U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A 41 65 Yes
a U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A 61 97 Yes
0 U+0030 DIGIT ZERO 30 48 Yes
$ U+0024 DOLLAR SIGN 24 36 Yes
£ U+00A3 POUND SIGN A1 F2 161 242 Yes
© U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN 8F A2 ED 143 162 237 Yes
U+20AC EURO SIGN not supported
α U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA A6 C1 166 193 Yes
А U+0410 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A A7 A1 167 161 Yes
U+4E2D C3 E6 195 230 Yes
U+3042 HIRAGANA LETTER A A4 A2 164 162 Yes
U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE not supported

Working with EUC-JP in Code

Every major language has built-in support for encoding conversion. The examples below show how to encode a string to EUC-JP bytes and decode it back to a Unicode string. Always specify the encoding explicitly — never rely on system defaults, which vary by OS and locale.

# Encode a string to euc-jp bytes
text = "Hello, 世界"
encoded = text.encode("EUC-JP")

# Decode bytes back to a string
decoded = encoded.decode("EUC-JP")
// Convert to euc-jp
$bytes = mb_convert_encoding(
    "Hello, 世界",
    "EUC-JP",
    "UTF-8"
);

// Convert back to UTF-8
$text = mb_convert_encoding(
    $bytes,
    "UTF-8",
    "EUC-JP"
);
// Encode to EUC-JP bytes
const encoder = new TextEncoder(); // UTF-8
const bytes = encoder.encode("Hello, 世界");

// Decode bytes
const decoder = new TextDecoder("EUC-JP");
const text = decoder.decode(bytes);
-- Create a database with EUC-JP
CREATE DATABASE mydb
  ENCODING 'EUC-JP'
  LC_COLLATE 'en_US.UTF-8';

-- Check database encoding
SELECT pg_encoding_to_char(encoding)
FROM pg_database
WHERE datname = current_database();

Compare with Other Encodings

See how EUC-JP differs from other encodings — which characters each supports and how the byte representations compare.

EUC-JP FAQ

When would I use EUC-JP instead of Shift-JIS?

EUC-JP was the standard Japanese encoding on Unix/Linux systems, older Japanese web servers, and Japanese email (ISO-2022-JP is related). If you are processing Japanese email archives, Unix system logs, or web content from legacy Japanese servers (especially pre-2005), EUC-JP is common. Shift-JIS is more common in Windows contexts.

How do I detect whether a Japanese file is Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, or UTF-8?

Use a library: chardet or charset-normalizer in Python, or uchardet on the command line. Valid UTF-8 is usually detectable reliably. Distinguishing Shift-JIS from EUC-JP is harder because their byte ranges overlap — the source system context is often the best clue. Always verify the result by checking that the decoded text renders correctly.