[Gdal-dev] Shapelib and UNICODE

[Frank Warmerdam]

David Garcia wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We are using shapelib version 1.2.10 to import GIS data in our 
> application. It works perfectly for English shapefiles but we we try to 
> import a shapefile in Japanese (the DBF part) we get garbage. Looking at 
> DBFReadStringAttribute and DBFWriteStringAttribute seems that shapelib 
> can only support char* and not UNICODE strings.
> 
> My question is: the GDAL/OGR support for shapefiles uses the same 
> library and, thus, have the same problem or is a different 
> implementation and support UNICODE?
> 
> I can move to GDAL/OGR is this will solve the problem or I can try to 
> hack the current shapelib version to include UNICODE support.

David,

The OGR library uses the same underlying implementation of dbf support as
in Shapelib so moving to OGR won't help.

If you have some multi-byte shape+dbf files that demonstrate this problem that
I could have for my test archive I would be appreciative.

If you submit patches via the shapelib bugzilla link I will try and incorporate
them into the base package if they aren't too distruptive.

Best regards,
-- 
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