"Dan Purgert" wrote

| No. What I mean is that the basic English codepage includes
| most Euro characters in the 128+ range.
|
| Sure, but that's not typically considered to be the "ASCII" characterset
| anymore. At least as I recall, "ASCII" is only the characters contained
| in the lower 128 bits (0x00 to 0x7f) of the larger "ANSI English"
| character set (well, in Windows as codepage 1250 or something. As I
| recall, ANSI never released anything after the draft -- it got rolled
| into ISO8859)
|

I think there's an issue of terminology. I just
posted an explanation to Carlos. The problem seems
to be that few people know all the technical details
and history. On Windows, there's no ASCII. It's all
ANSI. Each character is a byte, not 7-bit. If you
use any character above 127 it displays according
to the local codepage.

BUT, in most cases in English people are only using
up to byte 127, so their text files are valid ASCII,
valid ANSI with any codepage, and valid UTF-8.

But even Microsoft confuses things. They refer
to ANSI in the API and in the GUI when referencing
non-unicode, yet in the Windows scripting docs
they mistakenly refer to ASCII. Apparently the
people writing the docs didn't know the difference!