Text Files, ASCII, ANSI, Unicode and Code Pages

OK, so according to Joel Spolsky, I should have known this 7 or so years ago, but I’m only now dealing with multi-lingual text files so you’ll have to forgive me.  Anyway, this is a very instructive article on the encoding of text files:\

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