[Qgis-user] [1.8.0] Broken UTF-8 support in shapefiles - and workaround

[Andre Joost]

Hi all,

since 1.8.0 is now the offical stable version, I installed it on Windows 
7, besides the old 1.7.4.

The only thing that does not work as expected:
All text with non-ASCII-characters (e.g. ä ö ü) is broken.
The shapefiles are encoded utf-8, and read fine in OpenOffice and qgis 
1.7.4. It seems that they are interpreted as codepage "System", that is 
1252 for Windows.
If I create a new shapefile, given encoding=utf-8, this will be broken 
in OpenOffice and Qgis 1.7.4.

Layers from spatialite and postgis databases are not broken.

I found this workaround:
Look for the folder
C:\Program Files (x86)\Quantum GIS Lisboa\bin\
(or where the Program has been installed to)
open qgis.bat with a suitable text editor
Insert the line
SET SHAPE_ENCODING=UTF-8
in line 4
save it, and shapefiles in utf-8 will open correctly.

Hoping this might be useful to others...

And perhaps someone can put this into the windows installer.

Greetings,
André Joost