[Gdal-dev] RFC DRAFT: Unicode support in GDAL

[Mateusz Loskot]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Mateusz Loskot wrote:
>> Interesting quotes: "Note: You can now store Shapefile in UTF-8.
>> However, Shapefile encoded in UTF-8 will only be recognized in
>> ArcGIS Desktop."
>> 
>> I'm not sure how to understand this quote, but I also believe every
>> client software that works with Shapefile format is free to support
>> Unicode in Shapefile files, isn't it?
> 
> Mateusz,
> 
> I presume the above note is because there is no "standard" way of 
> indicating that text in a .dbf file is in UTF-8.  I persume ArcGIS is
> using some custom flag to keep track of this.  If we can figure out
> what they did, we could also honour it.

Frank,

I see.
So, in the meantime, we could just allow users to store UTF-8 strings
the DBF file and users would be required to know/memorize if this file
contains UTF-8 data or not, on the client side.
Another option (temporary) is to set our own flags in unused fields in
the main file header, for example byte 4, until we reveal how ArcGIS
stores encoding information.

I know, it's not very genuine solution :-)

Cheers
-- 
Mateusz Loskot
http://mateusz.loskot.net