What is ANSI format?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.