ANSI Encoding

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2024-12-04

What is the ANSI Text Encoding?

The term "ANSI" on Windows sometimes refers to an 8-bit character encoding that includes all of the 7-bit ASCII codepoints, despite the fact it's not an actual standard defined by the American National Standards Institute (the ANSI).

A label that reads "encoding" next to a button that reads "Utf-8" with an icon at its right that is an arrow pointing downward. Below, the same label and button, but the button is blue, and a list of items appears under it. Utf-8 is on the list and appears selected in blue. — Notepad's encoding dropdown list button, showing "ANSI" next to UTF encodings.

Quotes

“The term “ANSI” as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community. 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. However, in adding code points to the range reserved for control codes in the ISO standard, the Windows code page 1252 and subsequent Windows code pages originally based on the ISO 8859-x series deviated from ISO. To this day, it is not uncommon to have the development community, both within and outside of Microsoft, confuse the 8859-1 code page with Windows 1252, as well as see “ANSI” or “A” used to signify Windows code page support.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040531-00/?p=39103 (accessed 2024-12-04)

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