[mapserver-users] GetfeatureInfo-Request in an UTF-8 environment with shapfile in cp-1252

[Yewondwossen Assefa]

On 09/02/2011 7:34 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> On 11-02-08 09:37 AM, Siegel Andreas wrote:
>> Hi.
>> Our mapserver-eniromnent entirely works in utf-8 (mapfiles, webserver,
>> postgres, ..) with one exception, that is, all of our shapefiles.
>> The shapfiles are created/updated in an Windows-environment by several,
>> external contributors.
>> Hence they are encoded in Wiindows-ANSI (cp: 1252).
>> If i do an GetFeatureInfo-Request on the attibutes of the shapefiles all
>> special characters ("umlauts") are garbled.
>> This is no wonder since the content of the shapefile-attributes must be
>> recoded to utf-8 prior to insertion in the template.html.
>> How can this be acomplished? I could not find anything useful in the
>> documentation or with google.
>
> The short answer is that there is no mechanism in MapServer at the 
> moment to convert encoding of attributes displayed in a query 
> template, so your only options are to either change the encoding of 
> the data files to UTF-8, or change the template.html and its header to 
> match the encoding of the data. (The only place where MapServer 
> supports encoding conversion at the moment is in map labels, see the 
> ENCODING keyword in the LABEL docs.)
>
> Of course this could be a nice enhancement to MapServer if there was a 
> group interested in funding it.
>
> Daniel

Sorry to jump late on this. This issue I believe was identified and 
described in the trac bug [1]. An incomplete solutions was proposed in 
there but It definitely need more thinking.

[1] http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3297

Assefa

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Assefa Yewondwossen
Software Analyst

Email: yassefa at dmsolutions.ca
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