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

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?!?)