Convert a shapefile to GeoPackage or GeoJSON with ogr2ogr while avoiding character-encoding corruption
domain: gdal.org · 4 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Run ogr2ogr -f GPKG output.gpkg input.shp (or -f GeoJSON output.geojson input.shp) for the target format
If the shapefile has no .cpg file, set the SHAPE_ENCODING config option to the true source encoding before conversion
Know that without a .cpg file or explicit encoding override, GDAL defaults to reading DBF strings as ISO-8859-1
For zipped shapefiles or file geodatabases, reference them through the /vsizip/ virtual filesystem path rather than extracting manually
Known gotchas
the ISO-8859-1 default encoding assumption causes silently garbled attribute text with no thrown error
GeoJSON-to-GeoJSON round-trips preserve extra top-level/feature-level JSON members by default, but conversions from other source formats do not carry those over
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