[GRASS-user] Character encoding problem

[Glynn Clements]

[CC to grass-dev]

Jana Krajcovicova wrote:

> It is still desirable to change the character encoding directly in the .dbf
> file after import.
> Reason is that setting truetype and character encoding  using
> d.font.freetype only affects display commands, but reading database (e.g.,
> using db.select) is still scrambled.
> 
> Maybe there is an environmental variable in GRASS which can be used to
> change the default UTF8 encoding? But I would say that it is better to use
> OpenOffice to change .dbf file encoding in single cases.

There is a GRASS variable, GRASS_DB_ENCODING. However, it appears that
only the form library (used to display attribute information via
Tcl/Tk) actually uses this variable.

Modules which read text from databases and pass the text to the
R_text() should use R_encoding() to set the encoding accordingly. GUI
code should do something similar (the wx GUI reads this from
os.environ, although it's actually a GRASS variable).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>