[mapserver-users] mapfile and data encoding

[Frank Broniewski]

Hello list,

unfortunately I have to work with data in different encodings. Most of my data 
is in UTF-8 in a Postgis Database, so I decided to go with the mapfile 
encoding in UTF-8 as well. 

Some shapefiles I have are in windows-1252 or iso-8859-1 and have of course 
special characters in some fields. And I need to filter the data on these 
fields.

So my question is: can I somehow escape the special characters to iso-8859-1 
in my utf-8 mapfile so that the expression matches the data in the shapefile? 
Because right now I get a blank map. Obviously simply using the character "as 
is" in the mapfile does not work. I tried creating the character in iso-8859-1 
in the console but I only get a diamond with a question mark in it and this 
doesn't work neither. I found out that the sequence for é is 0xc3a9 but I 
don't know what to do with that information ...

Many thanks

Frank