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. The first disadvantage of ANSI is its use of a fixed byte to represent characters. 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. UTF-8 was developed to create a more or less equivalent to ANSI but without the many disadvantages it had. The main difference between them is use as UTF-8 has all but replaced ANSI as the encoding scheme of choice. This means that the detection of the encoding based on the content is based just on heuristic, so doesn't guarantee that the encoding used to open the file is correct.ANSI and UTF-8 are two character encoding schemes that are widely used at one point in time or another.

You can use the exec function of PHP to run the iconv program with the mentioned arguments, available on every UNIX based OS or in Windows ( using Cygwin).Īs mentioned, most of the text editors that use the automatic encoding detector decide which encoding to use according to the content, so normally although the strings stored in the file with PHP that have the Windows-1252 encoding (CP1252), the UTF-8 mode will be used. In PHP, you can achieve such thing using the iconv function, trying to detect the encoding of your data (usually UTF-8) and convert it into the new format namely Windows-1252 (CP1252): 'encoded_output_file.txt' Unicode also has control characters in that range. Windows-1252 (the code page most commonly referred to as 'ANSI') is similar to ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), except that Windows-1252 has printable characters in the range 0x80.0x9F, where ISO 8859-1 has control characters in that range. They were based on drafts submitted for ANSI standardization, but ANSI itself never standardized them. In some enterprises, this process is necessary as the software of other big companies is out of date and doesn't operate well with the UTF-8 default encoding, so you will need to change obligatorily the encoding of your generated files to the named 'ANSI' codification. The term 'ANSI' when applied to Microsoft's 8-bit code pages is a misnomer. This leads to a simply conjecture, the charset of the text file is defined by its data, so you need to convert the data that you will write into the file to a specific format. The fwrite function of PHP or file_put_content doesn't care about metadata of the file, it just writes the given data to the storage and that's it.

Ansi text file