encodingportugalqgis-3shapefile
I use a shapefile with names in Portuguese that contain special characters. When I add it to QGIS it exchanges special characters for symbols, so I have problems when comparing values with other layers.
I use QGIS – 3.8.3 Zanzibar on Ubuntu 18.04. So how can I correctly encode the special characters in the shapefile?
try opening the dbase-file with libreoffice (or openoffice) and try different encodings, if utf-8 doesnot work try iso-8859-1 and look if the chars öäüß are displayed correctly
Qgis 1.8.0 has a bug in correct encoding of shapefiles. Until this is solved, you can try this workaround in Windows:
Browse to C:\Programs\Quantum GIS Lisboa\bin on Windows XP or C:\Programs (x86)\Quantum GIS Lisboa\bin on Windows 7. Look for qgis.bat and open it with a suitable editor (I have installed notepad++ for such things). After line 1, insert:
SET SHAPE_ENCODING=UTF-8
This will ensure that all entries are encoded correctly. Of course, you have to save the shapefile in UTF-8 to make encoding properly.
Or, save as spatialite database. There are no known encoding issues with that.
Best Answer
First of all, it is suggested to explore the original file, perhaps it was already encoded in UTF-8 or any local Unicode Standard applied automatically by OS, from my experience Windows likes such practice.
Secondly, it is possible to apply one of the Standards for Western alphabetic languages, in particular ISO-8859-1, which includes Portuguese (European and Brazilian).
References: