What is ANSI format?

character-encoding ascii ansi codepages
web dunia picture web dunia · Mar 31, 2009 · Viewed 349k times · Source

What is ANSI encoding format? Is it a system default format? In what way does it differ from ASCII?

Answer

Noldorin picture Noldorin · Mar 31, 2009

ANSI encoding is a slightly generic term used to refer to the standard code page on a system, usually Windows. It is more properly referred to as Windows-1252 on Western/U.S. systems. (It can represent certain other Windows code pages on other systems.) This is essentially an extension of the ASCII character set in that it includes all the ASCII characters with an additional 128 character codes. This difference is due to the fact that "ANSI" encoding is 8-bit rather than 7-bit as ASCII is (ASCII is almost always encoded nowadays as 8-bit bytes with the MSB set to 0). See the article for an explanation of why this encoding is usually referred to as ANSI.

The name "ANSI" is a misnomer, since it doesn't correspond to any actual ANSI standard, but the name has stuck. ANSI is not the same as UTF-8.

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