OGR WRAP character

[Julien-Samuel Lacroix]

Hi All,
I guess this is more for Frank, but it can interest other people.

MapInfo files have a way to indicate that there's a new line in labels. 
They stock the character 10 internally (a \n) for the TAB format. 
Normally in a MapServer mapfile we would put WRAP "
" in our LABEL 
definition t have multiple lines. However, OGR (read: the MITAB driver) 
convert all '\n' into a '\' and a 'n' and all '\' into '\\'. This is to 
get a readable StyleString I guess. Also, the spec of the MapInfo MIF 
format says that it stores the new line character as a '\' and a 'n' 
(two characters).

This cause a problem in the MapServer context where the WRAP keyword 
takes only one character. With any MapInfo files, the multiline text 
can't be multiline because of this \n issue.

My questions:
Does other OGR drivers have this kind of problem? Or is MITAB a special 
case?
Is there a unified way to return the end of line in strings? Or should 
be there one unified way?
In any case, the MIF file format two characters is still an issue, but 
maybe it's not used enough to worth any change...

Possible solutions:
- Modify MapServer to get all the '\'+'n' characters that comes from OGR 
strings converted into "\n" (LF). Via the PROCESSING keyword maybe.
- Modify The WRAP keyword to accept string. This will enable any strings 
to be wrapped on multiple characters. Anyone beside me is interested in 
this?
- Modify MITAB to return "\n" in it's StyleString. But I don't know how 
much impact it can have on the library and it does not fix the MIF file 
issue.
- Others

Any thought?

Thanks
Julien
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Julien-Samuel Lacroix            jlacroix at dmsolutions.ca
DM Solutions Group               http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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