EUC-JP (Extended Unix Code for Japanese) is a character encoding developed for handling Japanese text on UNIX operating systems. It represents JIS X 0208 kanji using 2 bytes per character.

On UNIX-based systems like Linux and FreeBSD, EUC-JP was once the default locale for Japanese text. Linux Japanese environment guides cover the history of EUC-JP.

EUC-JP is compatible with ASCII: half-width alphanumeric characters use 1 byte, while Japanese characters use 2 bytes. Unlike Shift_JIS, EUC-JP byte sequences are easier to parse programmatically.

Today, the migration to UTF-8 is nearly complete, but EUC-JP is still encountered in legacy systems and log files. Character encoding conversion guides explain how to convert between encodings.