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

[Andre Joost]

Hi,

Am 29.06.12 09:28, schrieb Alexander Bruy:

>> The only thing that does not work as expected:
>> All text with non-ASCII-characters (e.g. ä ö ü) is broken.
> Fisrt of all this is known issue and it is not QGIS bug, but GDAL one.
> See http://hub.qgis.org/issues/5255,

It lokks as if Qgis and GDAL are not talking properly to each other ;-)

>
> Also your solution will work only in some cases, when shapefiles are
> in UTF-8 encoding.

That was more or less standard with Qgis 1.7.4. So most end-users are 
stuck with UTF-8 shapefiles now displayed broken, creating new 
shapefiles with wrong encoding and may not find the solution in the 
russion blogpost mentioned in the issue #5255:
<http://ssrebelious.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/qgis-and-gdal1-9-encoding-issue-a-workaround/>

I hoped this issue would be setteled for the "stable" version 1.8.0.


> So if you use in one project shapefiles with different
> encodings this will not work.

The other solution would be a seperate .cpg file along with the .shp. 
But I didnt test it, and I dont know what is chosen if environment 
variable and .cpg have different values.

> Also this will not work if shapefile encoding
> not supported by GDAL recoding method.
>

Ok, then you are lost after all, but you would not get those cases from 
proper working older qgis projects anyway.

Greeteings,
Andre Joost