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

[Peter Hopfgartner]

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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Dott. Peter Hopfgartner

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