The table opens with both the English and the Arabic showing properly (that's why FGDB was used in the first place). Not helpful just yet.ģ) In ArcMap, open the Attribute Table of a layer from the FGDB. dbf files themselves don't contain the Arabic characters. dbf portions of the shapefiles themselves, opened in Excel or whatever, have gibberish instead of Arabic it's not merely a display issue in the GIS program, it's that the. To export, right-click a layer and choose Data-> Export Data, click the folder button in the export dialogue to bring up the Save dialog, and choose Shapefile as the output format.ġb) Alternate method to the above: navigate to the FGDB in ArcCatalog, right-click it, choose Export -> To Shapefile (multiple), and export the whole FGCB as a folder full of shapefiles in a single operation).Ģ) Now you have a set of shapefiles with gibberish where the Arabic script should be (on my machine it displayed question marks in place of characters). Steps:ġ) Add the layers from the FGDB into ArcMap (I used 10.1, but there's absolutely no reason for it not to work in earlier versions, because the encoding bit happens later, outside of Arc). cpg file to each shapefile to inform ArcGIS of the new encoding of the.

dbf with proper UTF-8 data fields and save the. dbf (in the wrong encoding), then export the Attribute Table of the same layer as text (in the right encoding, which is UTF-8), and use another program to replace the contents of the shapefile. The basic idea is: from the FGDB export a shapefile including a.But I have no experience of using iconv under Windows, so I can't vouch for it.īelow the details of the process I used for converting a File GeoDataBase with Arabic fields into shapefiles with UTF-8 encoding that open happily in both QGIS and ArcMap showing both Arabic and English correctly (without using extensions to export or to read): For Windows I found LibIconv for Windows.

If you're working in a Linux environment then iconv should be installed already. For example: shp2pgsql *postgrestablename* | iconv -f *sourceencoding* -t *targetencoding* | psql -d *yourdatabase* You can use iconv to convert from one encoding to another, and you can use this as part of the shp2pgsql process.

Change text encoding libreoffice