[gdal-dev] DBF unicode problem

[William Kyngesburye]

I tried viewing a unicode shapefile created from GDAL in ArcGIS and it didn't work.

After some poking around I found out about the LDID value in the DBF header and the .cpg file that Arc uses.  I see that GDAL sets the LDID to some value - is this supposed to be UTF-8, or something else?

I couldn't get Arc to recognize unicode in the shapefile until I zero'd the LDID in the DBF (it overrides the cpg if set) and added a .cpg file with the UTF-8 value.

Maybe GDAL needs a creation option in the shapefile driver to set the LDID or to instead add a cpg file with an encoding value.

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William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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