Tell me more ×
Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 4 down vote favorite

I have a problem with Quantum GIS and Mapinfo, in both Windows XP and Windows 7. I need to use French and Arabic. One field is called Name_fr, and the other Name_AR. The Arabic is fine until the moment I save the table, and all the characters turn into question marks.

Thank you for the help.

share|improve this question
Have you had this error with previous versions of QGIS, or is it only in 1.8 that you've experienced these problems? – Geoist Aug 1 '12 at 23:19
I am new to qgis,so I didn't previous releases of qgis.Seems to have the same problem with Mapinfo. – Temmar Aug 2 '12 at 16:29

1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote

This issue came up with improvements to GDAL's handling of encoding. It was discussed here on the qgis maillist. There are some suggested workarounds in that dicussion. I'm sure a permananet solution will appear soon, but what I found solves the problem fro now is the suggestion by Even Rouault:

First you need to have all the text attributes in your shapefile encoded as UTF-8. THen add to the batch file that starts QGIS (usually OSGEO4W\bin\qgis.bat) one line to set an enviroment variable:

SET SHAPE_ENCODING=UTF-8

With that, you can then save text strings (in my case in hebrew, but I suppose Arabic will be the same) without it getting turned into question marks.

share|improve this answer
That seems to work Fine. Thank you very much for the Help. – Temmar Aug 3 '12 at 15:47
Good morning By any chance, is there a similar action for the mac. I don't know if there is an equivalent to qgis.bat on a mac Best regards Ahmed – user12528 Nov 6 '12 at 11:24
I'm not sure the problem even appeared on MacOS. What versions of QGIS and gdal are you using? – Micha Nov 7 '12 at 12:12

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.