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Eight bit

An eight bit encoding is an encoding which uses all eight bits of a byte, in other words the full range of values of the byte from 0 to 255. In contrast, a seven bit encoding is an encoding such as ASCII which only uses values from 0 to 127. In Japanese information processing, EUC-JP, Shift-JIS and UTF-8 are eight bit encodings, whereas ISO-2022-JP is a seven bit encoding.