How to encode shapefiles from LATIN1 to UTF-8?
Assuming that you are on Linux and have access to a recent version of GDAL you can try the following (from this post) :
export SHAPE_ENCODING="ISO-8859-1"
ogr2ogr output.shp input -lco ENCODING=UTF-8
Note: LATIN1 should work too instead of ISO-8859-1.
In Windows, do NOT set the SHAPE_ENCODING
, ogr2ogr
does not recognize ISO-8859-1
, nor LATIN1
.
You can do this with QGIS. First load your shapefiles then save as
and coding select dropdown menu utf-8 and then save your file.
If my understanding of Shapefiles is correct, the part that is encoding-sensitive is the attribute database contained in the DBF file.
Here is an answer that helped me solve this issue using LibreOffice Calc/Base:
https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/3663/17998
It has the additional benefit that you can open the DBF file using a distinct character set and thus find out what the current encoding actually is.