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SKIP codes are useful to look up unfamiliar kanji, but unfortunately they cannot identify a single kanji as there may be dozens of others sharing the same SKIP number. The same may be true for readings, meanings or whatever. In order for a computer to process kanji, it uses various identifying numbers, one of which is shown at the bottom of each page of the textbook called the Hex ID or JIS Hex. (The Japanese Industry Standard hexadecimal code). This number is like a post code, and is useful if you wish to clearly identify a glyph but don’t have Japanese software or other easy way to communicate the correct kanji.
Other methods exist to encode Japanese characters for use on a computer, including Shift-JIS, EUC, and Unicode. As no one of the encoding schemes has become the de facto standard, various ones are in use today. The processing of languages like English is based on one byte to one character, whereas Japanese characters are represented by a double-byte.
Many of the kanji dictionary sites on the internet are based on a vast database developed by Jim Breen called ‘edict’. A couple of the more user-friendly sites based on this comprehensive dictionary are:
http://www.whiteknightlogic.net/kanjidb
http://www.mahou.org/Kanji
These provide a great resource for reference, buy you should bear in mind that they are database driven and can sometimes give you a little ‘too much information’, and it is not always apparent which of the scores of words given for a kanji are still in popular use.
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