Difference Between ANSI and UTF-8

The ASCII character set is almost 50 years old. It’s still the most common encoding used for English-language websites, but it cannot handle all Unicode characters. For example, emoji are not supported by ASCII and must be encoded using other methods. The two most popular alternatives are UTF-8 and ANSI encoding. Understanding these differences will help you select the best option for your website or app:

What is ANSI?

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is an organization that sets standards for encoding text in computers, printers and other devices. The ANSI standard defines how to encode 7-bit characters.

What is UTF-8?

UTF-8 is a character encoding scheme, which means it’s a method of representing text in digital form. Most people think of their computers as being able to only display ASCII, but UTF-8 is one of many ways to represent characters on your computer screen.

There are two main types of encoding schemes: fixed-length and variable-length. Fixed-length encodings store each character in exactly the same number of bytes (the same amount), while variable-length encodings can use different numbers of bytes depending on how long the text is. For example, if you have an English word like “dog” with three letters in it then there will be only 3 bytes needed; however if you had a German word like “Hund” which has four letters then 5 bytes would be needed! This allows computers to store more information per unit space than would otherwise be possible if every letter was stored using precisely four bits per letter (e.g., ASCII).

Advantages of ANSI over UTF-8

• ANSI is a single-byte encoding
• ANSI is backward compatible with ASCII
• ANSI is supported by all major operating systems
• ANSI is supported by all major programming languages (i.e., Java and C/C++)
• All major browsers support ANSIs

Advantages of UTF-8 over ANSI

UTF-8 is more efficient in terms of bytes used.

UTF-8 is more compact than ANSI. It uses less space to encode characters, so it’s more efficient if you’re working with large files or data sets that have lots of text.

UTF-8 is more compatible with other character sets. You can use UTF-8 to encode Unicode characters (more on this later), but you can also use it for any other language that needs its own encoding scheme, such as Japanese kanji or Arabic letters and numbers–and even English characters if you want!

Finally, UTF-8 is more flexible than ANSI because it makes room for new additions as needed: If there’s another language that comes along later that requires its own encoding system, UTF-8 will be ready for it!

Takeaway:

• UTF-8 is more efficient than ANSI.
• UTF-8 is more compatible with the Unicode standard, which means that it can represent a larger number of characters and languages.
• UTF-8 is more compact than ANSI when dealing with English text, but less so when dealing with other languages (because they require more bytes). For example: “Hello World” in ASCII takes up 5 bytes; in UTF-8 it takes 6 bytes; and if you want to write the same thing in German using ISO 8859-1 encoding scheme (which uses only 7 bits), then your string would consume 10 bytes instead!

In conclusion, ANSI and UTF-8 are two different standards for encoding Unicode characters. ANSI is older and simpler but can only support up to 127 characters in one byte, while UTF-8 is more modern and supports more languages but requires more space on the disk.