<p>I have an application which is supposed to work on both windows and Mac and is localized in Portuguese, Spanish and German. I have an ini file from where the localized strings are read from. But the ini file doesn't work with same encoding for the files on both platforms. For Windows I have to have the file in ANSI format or else the accented letters in the localized strings get messed up and on the Mac the same file should be in Western( Mac OS) encoding or else the same result. Is there any way I can get a single file to work on both platforms?</p>

(1) There is no such thing as
the
ANSI format. That's an unfortunate term for what on Windows means "the local codepage". In particular, this means that in Europe the interpretation of bytes 128-255 as "ANSI format" will differ between countries. So, I am strongly inclined to argue that it won't even work on your first platform, let alone both.
The solution you will eventually migrate to is Unicode. That works everywhere, with all characters, and the number of a character does not depend on the country or the current date (See introduction of €).