ANSI versus Unicode

After our radio show, we received a call from Rudy. He wanted to know about ANSI...

The American National Standards Institute is an organization that promotes standards. One of them was the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set (letters, numbers, and symbols) that computers use. One major draw back to ASCII was you could only have 256 different characters.

Unicode allows for up to 65,536 different characters. In the past, Unicode was not compatible with all operating systems. If you are using a current operating system, I expect you should not be concerned about choosing Unicode.