[gdal-dev] Re: Writing non-ASCII characters to shapefile

[Francis Markham]

Okay, I will take that approach then.  Thank you all for your help.

What specific value should I write into the .cpg? The string '65001'
or the string 'utf-8' or something else?

-Francis

On 5 July 2010 21:53, Peter Hopfgartner <peter.hopfgartner at r3-gis.com> wrote:
> Hi Francis,
>
> what does not portable mean? ArcMap handles UTF-8 fine, if the correct
> encoding is written into the .cpg file. Recent shapelib should handle
> this fine, too. If there is any problem with a specific GIS program, a
> bug report for that GIS program might be the right thing to do.
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter
>
> On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 19:18 +1000, Francis Markham wrote:
>> At the bottom of this page, for one:
>> http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=21106
>>
>> But honestly I've found hard to find  information about this.  I'd be
>> very happy to be corrected if this is not the case!
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Francis
>>
>> On 5 July 2010 19:09, Hermann Peifer <peifer at gmx.eu> wrote:
>> > Francis, you wrote:
>> >
>> >> > I have heard that the use of UTF-8 in shapefiles is not portable.
>> >
>> > Where did you hear this?
>> >
>> > Regards, Hermann
>> >
>> >
>> > On 03/07/2010 04:40, Francis Markham wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hi there,
>> >>
>> >> I'm trying to write data from a Microsoft Excel .xls file into a
>> >> shapefile, using OGR's Python bindings in Python 2.6.  This is going
>> >> well, but I am having some problems when I try to write values that
>> >> contain so-called "smart quotes".  Smart quotes are special
>> >> characters, defined as characters 0x91 through 0x94 in Windows-1252 (
>> >> see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/goglobal/cc305145.aspx ).
>> >>
>> >> What is the best way to save this data to a shapefile using OGR?  I
>> >> need the shapefile to be interoperable with other programs, including
>> >> but not limited to ESRI products. While I assume I could simply
>> >> translate these characters to standard ASCII, I would prefer not to if
>> >> possible.  I also haven't tested the shapefiles with data from other
>> >> character encodings.
>> >>
>> >> I have heard that the use of UTF-8 in shapefiles is not portable.  I
>> >> am also aware that shapefile.cpg can store a shapefile's codepage.  I
>> >> don't know how to put these pieces together to create a portable
>> >> solution, however.
>> >>
>> >> Apologies if this is a newbie question, but I can't find answers on the
>> >> web.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >>
>> >> Francis Markham
>> >
>> >
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>
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