ANSI
How ANSI works
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) is the US body that ratified the original ASCII standard as ASA X3.4-1963 and its subsequent revisions through ANSI X3.4-1986. In computing, "ANSI" is often misused to mean Windows-1252 encoding, because early Windows labeled its default code page as "ANSI" despite it not being an actual ANSI standard.
This naming confusion persists in tools like Notepad, which still offers "ANSI" as a save option when it actually means the system's default Windows code page. When someone says "save as ANSI," ask which code page they mean - CP1252 for Western European, CP1250 for Central European, or one of 22 other possibilities.
This naming confusion persists in tools like Notepad, which still offers "ANSI" as a save option when it actually means the system's default Windows code page. When someone says "save as ANSI," ask which code page they mean - CP1252 for Western European, CP1250 for Central European, or one of 22 other possibilities.