CP932

CP932, also known as Windows-932 or MS932, is a character encoding used by Microsoft for Japanese text on Windows. It is a variant of Shift JIS designed as the Windows extension to the standard Shift JIS, and it became the de facto encoding for Japanese Windows software and files.

Technically, CP932 preserves the general Shift JIS structure: ASCII characters map to the standard ASCII codes, while Japanese characters are encoded using two-byte sequences that combine lead and trail bytes. CP932 also includes extensions beyond plain Shift JIS, adding a set of additional kanji and other symbols and providing certain Windows-friendly mappings to improve round-tripping with Japanese software.

One of the most noticeable differences from pure Shift JIS is the handling of certain bytes and the inclusion of extra characters. For example, the 0x5C byte, which in some Shift JIS contexts maps to a backslash, is interpreted as the Yen sign in CP932. CP932 is commonly discussed alongside Windows-31J, a closely related variant used on non-Windows platforms; the two are largely compatible but have small differences in character sets and mappings.

Usage and context: CP932 is the standard encoding for Japanese text in Windows environments from the late 1990s onward, particularly for legacy applications and files that predate Unicode adoption. In modern software development, Unicode encodings (such as UTF-8 and UTF-16) are preferred for new data, but CP932 remains relevant for legacy data exchange, compatibility with older Windows software, and environments that require non-Unicode encodings.