In the West European languages every character you see in this and most documents you read on the web is an ANSI (and sometimes an) ASCII character.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The True ASCII set only consists of 128 characters which have ASCII values of 0 (zero) through 127 (7 bits). However, as a single byte (8 bits) of data can represent 256 different numeric values, the extended ANSI (American National Standards Institute) set is the most widely used character table and it contains a further 128 characters. Hence the ASCII set is a subset (the first half) of the ANSI set. Generally speaking whenever you see a reference to the ASCII set, it is safe to assume that the author probably means ANSI as its use has become somewhat sloppy. Certainly anywhere on this site, unless we specify otherwise, you can read ASCII as being interchangeable with ANSI.
To illustrate how the computer understands the ANSI/ASCII values try this experiment.
Go into a word processor or notepad. Type the letter "A". Now hold the "Alt" key down, and while holding it, type the numbers "65" then release the alt key.
You should see the capital A appear again. It will not surprise you to learn that "Alt 66" will produce "B", "Alt 67" gives us "C" and so on. Now try "Alt 171", 172 etc.
Some won't produce anything (Alt Zero for instance) and many numbers will produce only a "?" because they represent values which cannot be printed. (Try any number lower than 20 for example)
