What is the difference between ANSI and ASCII?

Many people tend to be confused about the differences between ANSI and ASCII. ANSI and ASCII can be simply defined as encoding schemes.ASCII and ANSI have now begin replaced by more comprehensive Unicode because they are old character encoding schemes

ASCII was first created before ANSI. When ASCII was created, it had only 7 bits for a total maximum combination of 128 characters. ANSI has 8 bits increasing the maximum number of characters to be represented up to 256 characters. ASCII is more straightforward to use, while ANSI is a little complicated. ASCII works with Unicode, while ANSI compatibility is very limited.ASCII characters are fixed to the code points, while the ANSI code points may represent different characters.

ASCII and ANSI may seem to be the same but you have to remember that they have already been replaced by a comprehensive Unicode. One of the main differences between the two is their compatibility. If you would check out the characters of the Unicode, you will notice that the first 128 characters that you will see can match with the ASCII.

This means that if you would like to open a file that has been encoded with ASCII, this will not be a problem. ASCII stands for (American Standard Code for Information Interchange.) ANSI, on the other hand, stands for (American National Standards Institute.)

When representing different characters in a digital format, the two most commonly used encoding schemes are ANSI and ASCII. Although both are most times confused to be the same, however, there are some differences between the two. ASCII is the older of the two since it was the first to be developed out of the two.

ASCII or (computing) American Standard Code for Information Interchange differs greatly from ANSI when you consider the number of characters used by each encoding scheme when representing them in a digital format. ASCII uses 7 bits, and that makes 128 to be the maximum number of characters can be represented.

In contrast, ANSI was developed to increase the number of characters that can be represented during character encoding. As a result of this development, the maximum number of characters to be represented has been expanded to 256 since it uses 8 bits. Another difference is that ASCII is very easy to use compared to ANSI.