ANSEL

ANSEL, the American National Standard for Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use, was a character set used in text encoding. Some implementations of the GEDCOM genealogical data standard use it, although the latest version of that standard supports the more modern UTF-8. ANSEL has been withdrawn as a standard by ANSI.

ANSEL uses 8-bit characters which encompass the 7-bit ASCII set as well as some extended characters which include a set of combining forms used to express characters with diacritical marks; the combining character is placed first with the character it modifies following. There are a number of unused code positions, which have sometimes been filled in with other characters and combining forms in extended implementations; GEDCOM has a few such additions in its own version of the standard.