MetaChat - Is UTF-8 better than ANSI?

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23 July 2010

Is UTF-8 better than ANSI? →[More:]Yesterday I put Droptext on my iPad. It showed a "could not read" error when trying to open my .txt files until I used Notepad++ to convert their encoding from ANSI to UTF-8.

Word 2007's default .txt encoding is ANSI. Should I expect Droptext to be able to read it? Or is Microsoft advantaging some proprietary thing over a more universal standard?

post by: Joe Beese at: 11:26 | 2 comments

I tried to do some quick googling about this then re-discovered how guttingly complex character encoding issues are

What I can conform is that ANSI is a Windows style character encoding. It's definitely not as encompassing as UTF-8 but there's no reason other systems shouldn't be able to read it

posted by Firas 23 July | 12:12

Depends what ANSI. ANSI_X3.4-1968 is ASCII, and ASCII happens to be valid utf-8.

posted by Tobu 23 July | 13:51

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