[postgis-users] problem with pgsql2shp and special characters/umlaute

[gis at eifelgeist.com]

Hi, 

concerning special characters (like £, § ...) and umlaute (like ä, ü, ö) I encountered some serious problems which are described as follows: 

I dump an existing shapefile to PostgreSQL using shp2pgsql.exe and psql.exe. This process works fine...all special characters and umlaute are displayed correctly in database.

After that the same data has been dumped from PostgreSQL to shapefile using pgsql2shp.exe unfortunately the encoding of special characters and umlaute does not work properly since special characters and umlaute does not remain the same. Examples are as follows:
 
Savièse = Savièse
Unterbäch = Unterbäch
Grône = Grône
Bürchen = Bürchen

§ = §
£ = £

Has anyone any idea?

I use PostgeSQL 8.1.3 with POSTGIS 1.0.4 and GEOS 2.1.4. 
The encoding of the database is SQL-ASCII. 

Is it the right encoding of database?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help. 

Kathrin