Geodatabases – Character Encoding Support in Geodatabases and Shapefiles

convertesri-geodatabase

I've got several geodatabases that include feature classes with Greek letters in a lot of the attributes. When I try exporting a feature class as a shapefile from ArcCatalog, the attributes are butchered in the shapefile data, some kind of character encoding problem (they look like this in the shape: ??etr??e?). The same thing happens when I use ogr2ogr in FWtools to convert layers from the MDB to KML, shp, etc.

Does anyone have experience trying to deal with encoding formats across GIS data formats?

The real goal here is to get some data from these Esri geodatabases into a Postgres/PostGIS database, but broken encoding isn't going to work. I was going to export from the geoDBs to shapefiles, then load them in with shp2pgsql. Is that the easiest path to get there?

Best Answer

I think you're part way there. You can use iconv to convert from one encoding to another, and you can use this as part of the shp2pgsql process. For example:

shp2pgsql *postgrestablename* | iconv -f *sourceencoding* -t *targetencoding* | psql -d *yourdatabase*

If you're working in a Linux environment then iconv should be installed already. For Windows I found LibIconv for Windows. But I have no experience of using iconv under Windows, so I can't vouch for it.

Hope this helps!

Jo

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