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

[Francis Markham]

It appears from
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2010-May/024619.html and
http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=26015  that
ESRI set the LDID to zero to indicate an unknown LDID.  From my
reading of the OGR sourcecode, it seems that OGR uses the shapelib
default LDID of 0x57 (previously it was set to 0x3, or windows-1252).
Is there any way to specify this value using the OGR API, or do I need
to use shapelib directly to create my shapefiles in order to do this?

Cheers,

Francis

On 6 July 2010 18:31, Hermann Peifer <peifer at gmx.eu> wrote:
> The .cpg files we generate through ArcGIS desktop contain the string: UTF-8
>
> Some time ago, there was a mail on this list about problems in case of
> conflicting information in the .cpg file compared to the Language Driver ID
> (LDID) in the header of a dBASE file, see:
> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2010-May/024619.html
>
> Hermann
>
> On 06/07/2010 04:13, Francis Markham wrote:
>
> Okay, I will take that approach then.  Thank you all for your help.
>
> What specific value should I write into the .cpg? The string '65001'
> or the string 'utf-8' or something else?
>
> -Francis
>
> On 5 July 2010 21:53, Peter Hopfgartner <peter.hopfgartner at r3-gis.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> 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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