[Qgis-user] Editing dbf attributes via Python Console

[Borys Jurgiel]

> - "Savana arbórea" is transformed into "Savana arbórea" or
> "Plantação florestal" into "Plantação florestal"
>
> prety annoying if you want to use that for your legend...

I believe everything is ok :) I don't know Windows very well, but I assume 
your system encoding is cp1252.

When you open any layer in QGIS, you can select encoding of its table (the 
widget at bottom of the OpenFile dialog).

The problem is that Manager saves layers always in utf-8 encoding at present 
stage, while your source layer was probably coded in cp1252. So when you add 
the layer from ArcGIS you need to choose the 'System' or 'cp1252' encoding 
(what is probably done by default), while for the layers saved by Table 
Manager, you need to choose utf-8 encoding. Let me know if it helps. 

I'll try to provide saving with various encodings in the next release.

> (2) The next point is that with the table manager I don't know any way (but
> please tell me if there is), for quickly selecting a couple of categories
> to generalize into a new category - e.g. records with "evergreen forest"
> and "dense forest" (in the field "vegetation") combining into one new
> category such as "dense or evergreen forest" (in the field "veg_general").

Thanks for this suggestion. Added to the TODO. Feel free to submit more 
priority wishes!

> But, I have tried doing it with OpenOffice Calc - but that doesn't give me
> good results (some link between table and maps get lost and so thing get
> screwed up) 

?? It sounds very bad... Can you write something more?