> I have never encountered a shapefile in UTF-16, but I am beginning to wonder > if we ought to support them.
While nobody has ever seen one such file, that remains a rather theoretical exercice :-) > I guess they would be more space-efficient for > languages like Chinese and Japanese, where most characters need three UTF-8 > bytes but only two UTF-16 bytes. This could be important since DBF reserves > only 10 bytes for field names. > > Some questions: > > Can the OGR Shape driver handle UTF-16? Probably not. I guess it would have issues with the NUL bytes found in characters of the ASCII subset of UTF-16. The shapelib DBF API assumes NUL terminated strings. > > (I also wonder if shapefiles in UTF-16 is a good idea, or if the GIS > community just ought to forget about them, but I guess there is no definite > answer to that!) I'd say unless such beasts are widely found in the wild, let's not bother too much about that... Even -- Spatialys - Geospatial professional services http://www.spatialys.com _______________________________________________ gdal-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
