Shift JIS
Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards) is a character encoding scheme primarily used for representing Japanese text in computing. It was developed in the 1970s-1980s as an extension of JIS X 0201 and is widely adopted in Japan for legacy systems, especially in Windows environments and older software. The encoding supports a mix of single-byte ASCII characters and double-byte Japanese characters, including kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
Developers should learn Shift JIS when working with legacy Japanese systems, such as older Windows applications, databases, or file formats that require compatibility with Japanese text. It is essential for maintaining and migrating legacy codebases, handling data interchange with Japanese partners, or developing software for specific industries like finance or government in Japan where older standards persist. However, for modern applications, UTF-8 is generally preferred due to its broader Unicode support and international compatibility.