• Character encoding in tables
• Introduction
• Setting table encoding
• Changing the default character encoding

Although .dbf files should contain a byte to indicate character encoding, this information is usually not present. gvSIG provides the Shalom tool that sets the encoding and then reads the information in the table using that encoding. If the encoding is not set in this way then gvSIG will read the table data using the default encoding.

It is possible to set the character encoding of a table by selecting Table > Set encoding to .dbf files from the menu bar. Choose the table for which the encoding needs to be set and then select the encoding type (charset). This encoding setting is recorded permanently in the table.

Now the table can be added to the gvSIG project. When gvSIG opens the table the character encoding is read and the characters in the table are correctly displayed.

Note: The correct display of characters depends not only on the encoding setting, but also on the virtual machine that is installed (specifically Java 1.6, which supports more encodings than Java 1.5).

This option can be accessed by opening the Window > Preferences menu and then selecting DBF default encoding.

gvSIG will use the selected encoding as the default when adding a .dbf file to a project, and will also use it when exporting a table that uses a specific encoding.

The export of a table might not be correct if the character encoding is incorrectly configured in the gvSIG preferences.