[mapserver-dev] encodings

[Thomas Bonfort]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 18:43, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> Paul Ramsey wrote:
>>
>> Agree. Step one, a proposal that specifies the rules of the game. The
>> problem right now is the rules are pretty unclear. What is the
>> internal encoding for Mapserver? etc. Incidentally, making all
>> internal string handling UTF8 and then setting the MAP and LAYER flags
>> to indicate what the inputs are would be a nice touch.
>
> Folks,
>
> My personal opinion is that we should work towards making UTF8 the internal
> representation.  It would be up to data sources to convert on the fly to
> UTF-8, and when needed we could convert on output.

I was under the impression that there was no easy way of automatically
determining in what encoding the attributes of a datasource are. Given
that Frank pointed out to me on irc that this is not the case, I agree
that having the input drivers return utf8 is a better solution. We
could keep the encoding keyword at the layer level so that the user
can override the determined encoding.

>
> Interesting strings in the mapfile could also be provided in utf-8.
do you mean by forcing the user to encode his mapfile in utf8, or by
allowing any encoding and having it be specified by the map-level
ending keyword ?

regards,
thomas