[mapserver-users] Confirmation of status of UTF8 support, andwhere transcoding to Latin-1 may be happening.

[Nelson Soto]

The problem, it seems, is with Mapserver's UTF-8-type of support. To
clarify, UTF-8 is supported just fine in Mapserver, but if it is a
UTF-typeof encoding, then it tried to convert to UTF-8 which doesn't
seem to work well.

The data is in latin1 but is Unicode encoded, so that you achieve the
same thing in most environments and just about every program can
interpret this. Mapserver does have a little trouble with this. The
thing is, though, that it isn't so much ArcSDE as it is MSSQL, I think.
Could be wrong on that part but to make a long story short, I think
Mapserver is the component that converts the unicoded encoded latin1
into something that doesn't work. It's a standard-based process, I
think, so I doubt anything will change on the SDE half of it for the
seeming future. 

Not finger-pointing, I'm just expressing my interpretation of the
situation.

You can dump your ArcSDE config to a file and disable UNICODE_ENCODING
(I think that's the name of the field) and then reimport the file into
SDE and this will mean the collation and encoding will remain latin1 in
your case, but you will need to re-import all of your SDE data for the
change to take affect. This proved to be unsatisfactory for us and we
decided to take a 'wait-and-see' approach.

-----Original Message-----
From: mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Russell
McOrmond
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 8:40 AM
To: mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Confirmation of status of UTF8 support,
andwhere transcoding to Latin-1 may be happening.


On Sat, 22 Nov 2008, Russell McOrmond wrote:

>  I have a customer that is using MapServer, talking through ArcSDE to
an 
> Oracle database.

   Chris Whitteker is working on the same project, and I would like to 
apologize for duplicating the question.

   Howard Butler replied to Chris and suggested that the transcoding
from 
UTF-8 to Latin-1 is most likely happening within ArcSDE.  We have some 
peole here that are experts on SDE, but want to avoid the
finger-pointing 
(IE: They say the problem is in mapserver, and this list suggests the 
problem is in SDE).

   Can I get a quick confirmation that Mapserver supports UTF8 encoding,

and doesn't internally transcode to Latin-1?  Does it have the option to

transcode that we might have inadvertantly enabled?  This would help us 
know that we should focus our investigation on the settings of SDE and
not 
settings within mapserver.

   Howard Butler then asked "Do you know what the SOIL_ORDER_NAME_FR
column 
type is defined as?"

   Are you asking how the table is defined in the Oracle Database
(Answer: 
UTF8, confirmed by our database folks), or how it is defined elsewhere
in 
configuration for SDE or mapserver?

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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