ANSI vs UTF-8
ANSI and UTF-8 are two character encoding schemes that are widely used at one point in time or another. The main difference between them is use as UTF-8 has all but replaced ANSI as the encoding scheme of choice. UTF-8 was developed to create a more or less equivalent to ANSI but without the many disadvantages it had. Both UTF-8 and ANSI expand from the basic set of characters put forth by ASCII; so the two are basically equivalent when it comes to the first 127 characters.
The first disadvantage of ANSI is its use of a fixed byte to represent characters. In comparison, UTF-8 is more flexible as it is a multibyte encoding scheme; depending on the needs of the user, anywhere between 1 to 6 bytes can be used to represent a character. Because ANSI only uses one byte or 8 bits, it can only represent a maximum of 256 characters. This is nowhere near the 1,112,064 characters, control codes, and reserved slots of Unicode that can be fully represented within UTF-8. Using a multibyte encoding scheme makes it possible to accommodate all these code points yet manages to consume minimal memory. The first byte of UTF-8 matches ASCII exactly; hence, the most common characters only need a single byte.
In order to accommodate more characters, there were multiple ANSI pages created for different languages. You cannot therefore use certain characters at once if they do not belong to the same code page. It also requires that the program know beforehand which code page is being used or the incorrect characters would appear. UTF-8 doesn’t have any such problems since each character has its own distinct code point.
UTF-8 is superior in every way to ANSI. There is no reason to choose ANSI over UTF-8 in creating new applications as all computers can decode it. The only reason to be using ANSI is when you are forced to run an old application that you do not have any replacement for.
Summary:
1.UTF-8 is a widely used encoding while ANSI is an obsolete encoding scheme
2.ANSI uses a single byte while UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding scheme
3.UTF-8 can represent a wide variety of characters while ANSI is pretty limited
4.UTF-8 code points are standardized while ANSI has many different versions