[Featureserver] type=OGR & encoding problem

[Matt Priour]

I was just about to write the list asking the same thing (Is there a way to 
configure FeatureServer to use encodings other than UTF-8 or US ASCII?). But 
you have answered it before I could even ask it. I was running into the same 
problem with shapefiles containing Swedish accented characters.
Thanks
Matt Priour

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Christopher Schmidt" <crschmidt at metacarta.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 1:17 PM
To: "Alexandre Dube" <adube at mapgears.com>
Cc: "FeatureServer mailing list" <featureserver at openlayers.org>
Subject: Re: [Featureserver] type=OGR & encoding problem

> On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 02:02:56PM -0400, Alexandre Dube wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>   I have some .tab files I'd like serve with featureserver.  Their
>> encoding is iso-8859-1 and they do contain special characters such as
>> French accents.  If I use type=OGR in the .cfg file to serve the data, I
>> get the following error :
>>
>>   An error occurred: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 2:
>> unexpected code byte
>>
>>   I looked in the code source and it doesn't seem to support other
>> character encodings than utf8.  Is this right ?  Or is this a known bug
>> ?  Any workaround ?
>
> Not a bug, just a lack of functionality.
>
>     if isinstance(value, str): value = unicode(value, "utf-8")
>
> Change that line to iso-8859-1, and ou should be good. If youd like to 
> make
> it configurable and send a patch, all the better.
>
>>   If I import this file in PostGIS (with ogr2ogr + shp2pgsql (while
>> specifying iso-8859-1 as character encoding)) and use type=PostGIS
>> instead to link to this new imported data, I get no error, but I get
>> weird characters (lots of '\' and numbers instead of my special
>> character in the geojson string returned).  BUT, in the end, the special
>> characters get displayed correctly in the application (OpenLayers) so
>> it's ok.  This could be a good workaround, but I'd like to avoid the
>> transfer of each file I have in PostGIS if possible...
>>
>>   Any hint ?
>>
>>   Many thanks,
>>
>> -- 
>> Alexandre Dubé
>> Mapgears
>> www.mapgears.com
>>
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>> http://featureserver.org/mailman/listinfo/featureserver
>
> -- 
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta
>
>