ANSI ASCII/IBM ASCII

ANSI ASCII/IBM ASCII

 

ANSI ASCII is the name utilized in WinHex for an extension of the ASCII character set as used in non-Unicode Windows applications. It was named ANSI by Microsoft after the American National Standards Institute, but not defined by that institute. Several different regional variants exist, one of which is active in Windows, typically code page 1252 in countries where a Western European language is spoken. MS-DOS and Windows command prompt windows use what is called the IBM ASCII character set in WinHex (also called OEM or DOS character set elsewhere). All of these 8-bit extensions of the 7-bit ASCII character sets differ in the characters with values greater than 127. If for example if you store plain text file with Windows Notepad in ANSI encoding and later view it with the type command in a command prompt window, special characters such as German umlauts will not be displayed correctly. Some of the regional ANSI code pages are double-byte code pages, i.e. use even 2 bytes for some characters instead of just 1 per character.

 

Select the character set for the text column in the View menu, or click the top of the text column, where the name of the active code page/character set is displayed to change settings. Use the "Convert" command of the Edit menu to convert text files from one character set to the other.

 

The first 32 ASCII values do not define printable characters, but control codes: