Hi there, I'm trying to write data from a Microsoft Excel .xls file into a shapefile, using OGR's Python bindings in Python 2.6. This is going well, but I am having some problems when I try to write values that contain so-called "smart quotes". Smart quotes are special characters, defined as characters 0x91 through 0x94 in Windows-1252 ( see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/goglobal/cc305145.aspx ).
What is the best way to save this data to a shapefile using OGR? I need the shapefile to be interoperable with other programs, including but not limited to ESRI products. While I assume I could simply translate these characters to standard ASCII, I would prefer not to if possible. I also haven't tested the shapefiles with data from other character encodings. I have heard that the use of UTF-8 in shapefiles is not portable. I am also aware that shapefile.cpg can store a shapefile's codepage. I don't know how to put these pieces together to create a portable solution, however. Apologies if this is a newbie question, but I can't find answers on the web. Thanks, Francis Markham _______________________________________________ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev