[mapserver-users] ms4w, ArcSDE, NSTRING, iconv(), oops?

[Russell McOrmond]

   This may sound familiar to a problem from last year...

   We have data stored in ArcSDE which we are accessing with Mapserver. 
Strings are encoded in NSTRING (wide, UTF-16 encoded, etc).

   Last year we had an issue on Linux where there was differences in the 
default endianness for the UTF-16 to UTF-8 transcoding: glibc was assuming 
local processor endianness (Intel) and libiconv was assuming 
network endianness.   This was solved with a patch to Mapserver to detect 
the endianness and specify the right little or big endianness to iconv().

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/2878



   We are now noticing the same behavior with ms4w where characters coming 
from the database through ArcSDE are coming out all garbled.  The same 
mapfiles talking to the same ArcSDE and underlying data works fine with 
our Linux mapserver, but fails with ms4w.

   I had one of the Windows users here test with the latest stable ms4w 
which upgraded his MapServer from v. 5.2.0 to 5.2.1.    The ticket above 
indicates that the patch was backported to the 5.2 stream, but I don't 
know if there may be differences in the Windows libraries.   The issue is 
ensuring that the conversion from UTF-16 to UTF-8 happens correctly.


   Any thoughts?

   Thank you for any help.

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