Are [Windows-1252 and ANSI] the same thing?
Are Windows-1252 and ANSI the same thing?
– Yes, for all practical purposesWestern European languages, they are identically the same thing – provided that the language of the text file is "Western European".
If the natural language is not Western European, try consulting the following tableencodings. 1
| ANSI encoding | Language/Alphabet |
|---|---|
| Windows-1250 | Slavic languages – Latin alphabet: Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, … |
| Windows-1251 | Slavic languages – Cyrillic alphabet: Azeri, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, … |
| Windows-1252 | Western European languages: Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Irish, Spanish, … |
| Windows-1253 | Greek |
| Windows-1254 | Turkish, Latin Azeri, and Latin Uzbek |
| Windows-1255 | Hebrew |
| Windows-1256 | Arabic, Farsi, Urdu |
| Windows-1257 | Baltic languages: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian |
| Windows-1258 | Vietnamese |
For more detailsother natural languages,
see my table at the end of
see this post on how to encode a text file to display characters
instead of question marksanswer.
For charts displayingUnfortunately, the Windows-1252 character setWikipedia pages on the topic, this and
this,
seeare riddled with confusing statements and unreferenced claims.
You are much better off going directly to
one of the sources that Wikipedia this post, Section 4 about ASCII, ANSI, and UTF-8does reference.
It was written in May 2002 and says :
The term “ANSI” as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community.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 [May 2002], 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.
- Windows code pages | science.co.il
- Windows code pages | Wikipedia
- Display non-ASCII characters correctly instead of question marks
- Charts showing the Windows-1252 character set | Section 4
- Post containing a table of all ten Windows code pages
- Windows-1252 | Wikipedia
- ISO/IEC 8859-1 | Wikipedia
- Unicode and Windows XP | Cathy Wissink, Microsoft
1 SourcesFor :charts displaying the Windows-1252 character set, see this post, Section 4.