Question

why does iso 8859-1 not interpret german letters correctly?

  • 27 February 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 15 views

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I added a shapefile reader and set the character encoding to iso-8859-1 western european which includes german characters. When looking at the shp in ArcGIS the attributes are read correctly. In FME 2016 they are scrambled. See Screenshot. What is going wrong?


3 replies

Userlevel 4
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We'd need to look more closely, but my first hunch is that the data is not in iso-8859-1. If you've set that in FME as the encoding, we will honour your setting over whatever any companion shape file codepage file says. If you try without setting any encoding in FME, what does DI look like? If you're able to zip up all the shape file parts and post them here, we could look more deeply (or send them into support@safe.com if you don't want the data public)...or use ArcGIS to delete most of the records form a copy of the problematic file and post that).

Encodings are so much fun for sure...

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Hi @robertdbuckley

could you please try reading your data with Windows Latin-1 (windows-1252) encoding? Please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 for info about the difference between Win-1252 and iso-8859-1. Most likely your data is in Win-1252 rather than iso-8859-1.

If changing encoding on the Reader doesn't help, please submit support request as @daleatsafe suggested.

Userlevel 4

Hi

It looks like your data is stored as UTF-8 and not in ISO-8859-1.

Try setting Unicode UTF-8 as the codepage on your shape file reader.

David

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