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

[Andrey Kiselev]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 05:44:28PM +0200, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> Is my understanding correct that we won't reimplement GDAL drivers,
> for example Shape to accept UTF-8?
> So, strings will be converted to/from ASCII when reading/writing strings
> into GDAL internal buffers, to UTF-8 ?

...

> > For file format drivers the string representation should be worked out on
> > per-driver basis. If driver need to parse ASCII text there is no need to
> > convert strings to UTF-8 until they will be passed to GDAL functions.
> 
> I see, now my questions from above have been answered.
> Thought, I still think drivers should also support Unicode, at least
> OGR drivers, to be able to deal with i18n'ized
> strings in feature attributes.

You are absolutely right. Moreover, it is my primary goal to add Unicode
support to PG driver (I want localized table column names). But not all
file formats support non-ASCII characters. For example, various .HDR
labeled rasters are just 7-bit ASCII text files and it is not a good
idea to write 8-bit strings in such a files. When you need to pass
strings, extracted from such file outside the driver (e.g., in
SetMetadata() call), you should convert them to UTF-8. If you just want
to use extracted strings internally in driver, there is no need in any
conversions.

Regards,
Andrey

-- 
Andrey V. Kiselev
ICQ# 26871517