The problem, it seems, is with Mapserver's UTF-8-type of support. To clarify, UTF-8 is supported just fine in Mapserver, but if it is a UTF-typeof encoding, then it tried to convert to UTF-8 which doesn't seem to work well.
The data is in latin1 but is Unicode encoded, so that you achieve the same thing in most environments and just about every program can interpret this. Mapserver does have a little trouble with this. The thing is, though, that it isn't so much ArcSDE as it is MSSQL, I think. Could be wrong on that part but to make a long story short, I think Mapserver is the component that converts the unicoded encoded latin1 into something that doesn't work. It's a standard-based process, I think, so I doubt anything will change on the SDE half of it for the seeming future. Not finger-pointing, I'm just expressing my interpretation of the situation. You can dump your ArcSDE config to a file and disable UNICODE_ENCODING (I think that's the name of the field) and then reimport the file into SDE and this will mean the collation and encoding will remain latin1 in your case, but you will need to re-import all of your SDE data for the change to take affect. This proved to be unsatisfactory for us and we decided to take a 'wait-and-see' approach. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russell McOrmond Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 8:40 AM To: mapserver-users@lists.osgeo.org Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] Confirmation of status of UTF8 support, andwhere transcoding to Latin-1 may be happening. On Sat, 22 Nov 2008, Russell McOrmond wrote: > I have a customer that is using MapServer, talking through ArcSDE to an > Oracle database. Chris Whitteker is working on the same project, and I would like to apologize for duplicating the question. Howard Butler replied to Chris and suggested that the transcoding from UTF-8 to Latin-1 is most likely happening within ArcSDE. We have some peole here that are experts on SDE, but want to avoid the finger-pointing (IE: They say the problem is in mapserver, and this list suggests the problem is in SDE). Can I get a quick confirmation that Mapserver supports UTF8 encoding, and doesn't internally transcode to Latin-1? Does it have the option to transcode that we might have inadvertantly enabled? This would help us know that we should focus our investigation on the settings of SDE and not settings within mapserver. Howard Butler then asked "Do you know what the SOIL_ORDER_NAME_FR column type is defined as?" Are you asking how the table is defined in the Oracle Database (Answer: UTF8, confirmed by our database folks), or how it is defined elsewhere in configuration for SDE or mapserver? -- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Please help us tell the Canadian Parliament to protect our property rights as owners of Information Technology. Sign the petition! http://digital-copyright.ca/petition/ict/ http://KillBillC61.ca "The government, lobbied by legacy copyright holders and hardware manufacturers, can pry control over my camcorder, computer, home theatre, or portable media player from my cold dead hands!" _______________________________________________ mapserver-users mailing list mapserver-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users _______________________________________________ mapserver-users mailing list mapserver-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users
