Whats is the different beween Western European (Windows)-1252 and ANSI encoding?

Question

I'm trying to convert UTF-8 to ANSI encoding through a tool but it doesn't show the name of ANSI but Western European (Windows)-1252 instead.

Are they both same thing? Should I go ahead with this?

Solution

What is the difference between Windows-1252 and ANSI encoding?

See below. In practice it probably won't make much difference to your conversion.

If you keep a copy of the original file then you can always apply a different conversion if necessary.

Having said that there are ways of converting UTF-8 to ANSI.

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Windows-1252

This character encoding is a superset of ISO 8859-1 in terms of printable characters, but differs from the IANA's ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 80 to 9F (hex) range. Notable additional characters include curly quotation marks and all the printable characters that are in ISO 8859-15. It is known to Windows by the code page number 1252, and by the IANA-approved name "windows-1252".

...

Historically, the phrase "ANSI Code Page" (ACP) is used in Windows to refer to various code pages considered as native. The intention was that most of these would be ANSI standards such as ISO-8859-1. Even though Windows-1252 was the first and by far most popular code page named so in Microsoft Windows parlance, the code page has never been an ANSI standard. Microsoft explains, "The term ANSI as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community.

Source Windows-1252

Note that is spite of the above statement by Microsoft they still call Windows 1252 "ANSI":

Source Code Page 1252 Windows Latin 1 (ANSI)

Comments

[Abd]

so, there won't be difference in conversion. good explaination. thank you

[DavidPostill]

If you read the first bit of the answer again you will see that there may be a difference "differs from the IANA's ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 80 to 9F (hex) range" - it depends on exactly what characters are in your input.

[Abd]

i'm asked to finish my project through windows notepad encoding. hope you now understand what type of encoding i'm looking for.

[DavidPostill]

You could use Notepad++, it has build in encoding conversion from UTF-8 to ANSI :)