Support for getting encoding from .cpg files #247
Description
Describe the feature request
Non-standard but commonly accepted cpg file that specifies which text encoding to use. Would make for more robust handling of files and special cases. Main problem is figuring out which strings are used to represent encodings, appears to be non-standard.
May want to support both read and write support for this.
Contributions
- I am interested in implementing the described feature request and submit as a PR.
Activity
JamesParrott commentedon Oct 18, 2022
I'm not familiar with arc, but from googling, .cpg files do seem to be nothing more than one line text files. However their very nature does invite the following questions:
Are the .cpg files themselves encoded in utf-8, or what?
Or do all the encoding strings to be supported only use ascii characters, so it shouldn't matter if it's not utf-16?
karimbahgat commentedon Jan 10, 2023
Not sure at the moment, I suspect using ascii or utf8 would be a safe assumption and work in most cases. I haven't looked very hard though. Let me know if you find out, or want to submit a PR :)
JamesParrott commentedon Jul 25, 2026
Completed by #441, released in 3.1.6.
Tested with the latin1 shapefile (and anecdotally with a UTF16 shapefile from QGIS). Round trip tests to be added later (possibly with support for optionally writing .cpg files).