On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 05:11 -0400, xcopy@club-internet.fr wrote:
> Ansi is the way Windows encode accented characters, known as ISO-8859-1.
> ASCII is / was the way MS-DOS used it, I guess probably Codepage 850.for
> western european languages.

I wish it were that way... Windows encodes using proprietary windows
code page 1250 by default :-(. Hence the large number of web sites that
show funny characters instead of the proper accents and euro character.

The default encoding for non-windows systems is mostly 8859-1 for west
european countries, indeed (or the newer 8859-15 including Euro symbol).

Actually every platform/application really should be using UTF-8 these
days.