Web links discussing encoding in Windows

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Characters Vs. Bytes

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/26/UTF

How to Use Special Characters in Windows Documents

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315684

Windows-1252 (so called ANSI)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#cite_note-2

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701882/what-is-ansi-format

(The above links says: ANSI does not necessarily have to map to CP1252. It does, however, always refer to the legacy codepage set for the system. This may be CP1252 on western European or US systems but don't count on that)