[mapserver-users] Confirmation of status of UTF8 support, and where transcoding to Latin-1 may be happening.

[Russell McOrmond]

   I have a customer that is using MapServer, talking through ArcSDE to 
an Oracle database.

   When we do a GetFeatureInfo we notice that substitutions from the 
database have been transcoded from UTF8 (how the data is stored in the 
Oracle Database) to Latin-1 being output from MapServer (as viewed by 
the browser).  Other aspects of the page are UTF8 encoded, and the 
server is otherwise configured to set character encoding to UTF8.  The 
intention is to have everything be UTF8 from end-to-end (It is 
departmental standard).

   Legends and other such things are coming out correctly.

   When we connect directly to the ArcSDE server via the ArcGIS Desktop 
products the characters are displayed 'correctly', but not knowing these 
tools well I don't know if that means they are recognizing the Latin-1 
character set correctly and displaying that or recognizing the UTF8 
characters and displaying that.  We aren't using any characters that 
couldn't be correctly transcoded from UTF8 to Latin-1.  Either way, 
these tools are being told the correct character encoding and displaying 
correctly.


   We are looking for options of where to look next.  I'm not the person 
who compiled MapServer with the ArcSDE 9.2 SDK, but can easily confirm 
things with them if I knew what questions I should be asking.  Is there 
a quick way to confirm what character encoding is being output from 
ArcSDE so that we will know we need to be looking at settings there (IE: 
the NLS_LANG settings for SDE connecting to Oracle), or looking for 
something on the machine running Mapserver that is doing the transcoding.

Thank you for any help!

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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