Difference Between ANSI Code & Unicode

ANSI and Unicode are methods of encoding text as numbers. ANSI, a proprietary format created by Microsoft, has been largely replaced by Unicode, an open standard created by the Unicode Consortium that has better support for foreign languages.

ANSI Standard

• Microsoft created ANSI as a proprietary character encoding scheme that included over 200 characters -- letters, numbers, punctuation marks and some common special characters from languages other than English. ANSI is also known as Windows 1252. It is considered too English-centric to be a globally useful standard.

ANSI Drawbacks

• Microsoft made multiple revisions to the ANSI standard and released updated code pages for non-English languages, but it never contained enough unique characters to account for Asian languages, which typically have many more characters than languages based on the Roman alphabet.

Unicode Standard

• The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization that grew out of a collaboration between Apple and Xerox, created the Unicode open standard for text encoding. Unicode allowed text files written in many languages to be exchanged and read by multiple operating systems with a reduced chance of file corruption. Instead of using different code pages for different languages, Unicode assigns a single number to each character and supports a variety of world languages. Computer industry leaders adopted Unicode in place of ANSI, which Microsoft itself now classifies as an outdated, or "legacy," encoding scheme.