What is ANSI format

Question

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

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ANSI  aka Windows-1252 WinLatin1  is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet  fairly similar to ISO-8859-1  You may  want to take a look of it at Wikipedia

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Just in case your PC is not a  Western  PC and you don t know which code page is used  you can have a look at this page  National Language Support  NLS  API Reference   Microsoft removed this reference  take it form web-archive National Language Support  NLS  API Reference  Or you can query your registry   C   gt reg query HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Nls CodePage  f ACP  HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Nls CodePage     ACP    REG SZ    1252  End of search  1 match es  found   C   gt

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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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Strictly speaking  there is no such thing as ANSI encoding  Colloquially the term ANSI is used for several different encodings    ISO 8859-1 Windows CP1252 Current system encoding on a Windows machine  in Win32 API terminology

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ASCII just defines a 7 bit code page with 128 symbols  ANSI extends this to 8 bit and there are several different code pages for the symbols 128 to 255   The naming ANSI is not correct because it is actually the ISO IEC 8859 norm that defines this code pages  See ISO IEC 8859 for reference  There are 16 code pages ISO IEC 8859-1 to ISO IEC 8859-16   Windows-1252 is again based on ISO IEC 8859-1 with some modification mainly in the range of the C1 control set in the range 128 to 159  Wikipedia states that Windows-1252 is also refered as ISO-8859-1 with a second hyphen between ISO and 8859   Unbelievable  Who does something like that

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I remember when  ANSI  text referred to the pseudo VT-100 escape codes usable in DOS through the ANSI SYS driver to alter the flow of streaming text     Probably not what you are referring to but if it is see http   en wikipedia org wiki ANSI escape code

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When using single-byte characters  the ASCII format defines the first 127 characters   The extended characters from 128-255 are defined by various ANSI code pages to allow limited support for other languages   In order to make sense of an ANSI encoded string  you need to know which code page it uses

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Technically  ANSI should be the same as US-ASCII  It refers to the ANSI X3 4 standard  which is simply the ANSI organisation s ratified version of ASCII  Use of the top-bit-set characters is not defined in ASCII ANSI as it is a 7-bit character set   However years of misuse of the term by the DOS and subsequently Windows community has left its practical meaning as    the system codepage of whatever machine is being used     The system codepage is also sometimes known as    mbcs     since on East Asian systems that can be a multiple-byte-per-character encoding  Some code pages can even use top-bit-clear bytes as trailing bytes in a multibyte sequence  so it s not even strict compatible with plain ASCII    but even then  it s still called    ANSI      On US and Western European default settings     ANSI    maps to Windows code page 1252  This is not the same as ISO-8859-1  although it is quite similar   On other machines it could be anything else at all  This makes    ANSI    utterly useless as an external encoding identifier

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Basically  ANSI  refers to the legacy codepage on Windows  See also an article by Raymond Chen on this topic      The source of this comes from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft  which became ISO Standard 8859-1    The first 127 characters are identical to ASCII in most code pages  the upper characters vary  though   However  ANSI does not automatically mean CP1252 or Latin 1   All confusion notwithstanding you should simply avoid such issues nowadays and use Unicode

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Once upon a time Microsoft  like everyone else  used 7-bit character sets  and they invented their own when it suited them  though they kept ASCII as a core subset  Then they realised the world had moved on to 8-bit encodings and that there were international standards around  such as the ISO-8859 family  In those days  if you wanted to get hold of an international standard and you lived in the US  you bought it from the American National Standards Institute  ANSI  who republished international standards with their own branding and numbers  that s because the US government wants conformance to American standards  not international standards   So Microsoft s copy of ISO-8859 said  ANSI  on the cover  And because Microsoft weren t very used to standards in those days  they didn t realise that ANSI published lots of other standards as well  So they referred to the standards in the ISO-8859 family  and the variants that they invented  because they didn t really understand standards in those days  by the name on the cover   ANSI   and it found its way into Microsoft user documentation and hence into the user community  That was about 30 years ago  but you still sometimes hear the name today

[character-encoding] What is ANSI format?

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