[gdal-dev] Problem with umlauts and other special characters in shapefile attributes selected from Oracle Spatial

[Georg Sedlmeir]

Dear gdal-developers and users,

Our department (being part of the municipality of Munich) uses ogr2ogr 
to retrieve data from the city administration's central Oracle Spatial 
database as follows:

ogr2ogr -f "ESRI 
Shapefile"/opt/uis/muc/shapes_geodatenpool/aktuell/vagrund_adr_suche_`date 
+%Y_%m`.shp* -nlt POLYGON OCI:[rguuser1]/[kennwort]@serverxy.de -sql 
"select * from vagrund.adr_suche"

The command works fine basically, but characters like the german umlauts 
in attribute data end up as ? in the resulting .dbf files.

The character encoding used in the database is WEISO8859P15. My first 
idea was to use oracle's CONVERT command right in the sql statement to 
convert from WEISO8859P15 to UTF-8 but neither of them is featured in 
the list of supported encodings to be found in oracle's corresponding 
PL/SQL documentation.

Do you have any suggestions regarding a workaround or solution to the 
problem, maybe by changing gdal configuration settings? Any help would 
be much appreciated, thank you very much.

Best regards,




Georg Sedlmeir


Dipl.-Geograph

Landeshauptstadt München, Referat für Gesundheit und Umwelt
Abteilung Umweltschutz
Gesundheits- und Umweltberichterstattung (GUBE)
RGU-UW112

Bayerstr. 28a, 80335 München

Telefon: +49 - 89 - 233 - 4 75 40 
Telefax: +49 - 89 - 233 - 4 77 05 
E-Mail:  gube.rgu at muenchen.de

Elektronische Kommunikation mit der Landeshauptstadt München:
http://www.muenchen.de/ekomm