Fix export to include character strings with accents (French text) in shapefile when using writeOGR in R

Question

I have a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame in R that I want to export to shapefile. I used writeOGR to export but the cells with that contain text values with accents (é, è, à, ê, etc) are blank. When I export only the data slot as a csv file, the values are preserved.

I have used the following when exporting:

writeOGR(obj=for.ana, dsn=".", layer="for_export",driver="ESRI Shapefile", encoding="UTF-8")

When I want to import a similar shapefile with French accents, I use the following code that works:

readOGR(".","file", use_iconv=TRUE, encoding="UTF-8")

What is the equivalent code for exporting?

Answer 1

Use:

writeOGR(obj=for.ana, dsn=".", layer="for_export",driver="ESRI Shapefile", layer_options = "ENCODING=UTF-8")

Instead of:

writeOGR(obj=for.ana, dsn=".", layer="for_export",driver="ESRI Shapefile", encoding="UTF-8")

With layer_options, you add the parameters to ogr2ogr shell command. Check GDAL documentation for more options.