[GRASS-user] Importing Mapinfo files with encoding "cp1253'

[Nikos Alexandris]

Sylvain Maillard wrote:

> in the layer manager, menu "Settings" / then "preferences", tab
> "attribute", there is a field to specify encoding for data => this 
> does not
> change the encoding of the data, but the encoding used to display it 
> ...

I have imported the data set in QGIS, changed there the encoding to 
windows-1253 (Layer Properties > General (Tab) > Data source encoding) 
and viewed greek names properly. Saving the layer as a Shapefile and 
defining the encoding to be anything (!?), e.g. "System" or "UTF8" or 
"Windows-1253" seems to do the trick! Greek names appear, then, as 
expected in QGIS, in the shell via ogrinfo as well as in GRASS' shell.


The original Mapinfo file:

ogrinfo Roads.TAB -al |grep REGION |head -2
REGION: String (40.0)
   REGION (String) = �������

Importing the (above) file in GRASS and going through the way you 
suggested, doesn't help. Importing this in QGIS (by setting the encoding 
to Windows-1253 in the import dialog!), then exported as Mapinfo file:

ogrinfo Roads_QGIS_Exported.tab -al |grep REGION |head -2
REGION: String (40.0)
   REGION (String) = Τρίκαλα


The same Mapinfo file exported as ESRI Shapefile (with any of the above 
mentioned encoding) work fine as well.  The only difference I can spot 
between the two Mapinfo files is:

diff Roads/Roads.TAB Roads_QGIS_Exported/Roads_QGIS_Exported.tab

2,3c2,3
< !version 550
< !charset WindowsGreek
---
> !version 300
> !charset Neutral

[...]

Anyhow, the question is how to do this using GRASS directly.

Thank you Sylvain, Nikos

-- 
Nikos