Hello, I have downloaded shapefiles from http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/. I am after Czech and Slovak republic data, when I look into the files with any shapefiles viewer the name values have odd characters instead of diacritics. I would like to know what encoding is the underlying data in so I could transform it to Unicode or the proper character set. Thanks for any advice. asked 13 Jan '11, 16:26  Tomas Pajonk |
3 Answers:
The shapefiles on http://download.geofabrik.de/ are not an official OSM service, and the general OSM community would not know, nor be able to influence, the process that builds them. Having said that, however, the shape files use UTF-8 encoding like the rest of OSM does. Depending on what system you are using, you should be able to process them correctly if you add a .cpg file like so: answered 13 Jan '11, 16:52  Frederik Ramm ♦ |
Openstreetmap uses Unicode in UTF-8 encoding. The shapefiles however are not the native format of Openstreetmap and could be in some other encoding. Either check if they decode correctly using UTF-8 or check with the geofabrik guys. answered 13 Jan '11, 17:12  petschge |
Seems like you might use http://osm.kyblsoft.cz/archiv/ for the Czech republic. Taken from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm#Downloading -> Regional extract sources. answered 02 Mar '15, 02:51  mkonecny |
This may be a very daft question. Where can I find the official OSM service ?
There is no export of shapefiles made by Openstreetmap.org. There are other ways of solving this e.g. using PostgreSQL + PostGIS, which is as close to a standard way of reading OSM data in GIS applications as you can come.
Thanks for this. I got confused by the sentence that geofabrik isn't an official service, thinking there may be one.