Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages

Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Introduction This document describes the encoding used in electronic mail [RFC822] and network news [RFC1036] messages in several Japanese networks. It was first specified by and used in JUNET [JUNET]. The encoding is now also widely used in Japanese IP communities. The name given to this encoding is "ISO-2022-JP", which is intended to be used in the "charset" parameter field of MIME headers (see [MIME1] and [MIME2]). Description The text starts in ASCII [ASCII], and switches to Japanese characters through an escape sequence. For example, the escape sequence ESC $ B (three bytes, hexadecimal values: 1B 24 42) indicates that the bytes following this escape sequence are Japanese characters, which are encoded in two bytes each. To switch back to ASCII, the escape sequence ESC (B is used.