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Sorry if this isn't exactly the most 'language' related question, but what ranges of Unicode code points are needed to write Japanese?
I've got the Hiragana, Katakana, punctuation, etc; but the jōyō-Kanji are mixed in with the other Chinese characters.
I'm not asking for each code point, just the ranges, the pairings of starting and ending code points needed to define blocks of kanji.
The basic CJK Unified Ideographs (U+4E00 – U+9FFF) contain all of the characters defined in JIS X 0208 (aka 第1水準/第2水準), which contains almost all of the kanji in the current joyo-kanji list. As you know, this block looks like this, and it includes common and uncommon kanji from both Japanese and Chinese jumbled together. There is no simple way to narrow this down. Kanji in U+4E00 – U+9FFF should satisfy more than 99% of the needs to write Japanese kanji.
I said almost because an addition of Joyo-kanji occurred in 2010, which says one added character is a historically "different" kanji from what has been included in JIS X 0208. This resulted in one joyo-kanji being in Extension B block if you strictly need to reproduce the appearance listed in the new official Joyo-kanji list. People usually use the original JIS X 0208 version without even noticing it. This joyo-kanji is 𠮟: it is U+20B9F (in Supplementary Ideographic Plane; SIP), but many people use 叱 U+53F1 which has been available since the plain old JIS X 0208. See this article (in Japanese).
U+53F1, so you can keep using it, too. It has been widely used as one of the most easy and available kanji in the history of computing (第1水準). Suddenly declaring it wrong just because it was different in an ancient dictionary is insane IMHO. But I can't guarantee a similar thing won't happen again in the future.
– naruto
Mar 9 '17 at 6:36
