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

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as ANSI encoding. Colloquially the term ANSI is used for several different encodings:

1. ISO 8859-1
2. Windows CP1252
3. Current system encoding on a Windows machine (in Win32 API terminology).