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I'm using shapefiles with encoding UTF-8 that were used in ArcGIS before. The German umlaut ( ¨ ) are shown as a question mark. In Layer Properties -> Source -> Settings the encoding is set to UTF-8. Do I have to make additional settings so that I can see German umlaut?

Taras
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geofee
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    Have you opened the *.cpg file in a text editor to make sure the encoding is utf-8? – BERA Sep 06 '21 at 13:33
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    That they show as question marks indicates that they were set to the wrong encoding when saving the file. Otherwise an ü would be shown as ü. So the information is lost completely. You need access to the original source to fix this: Before saving the data to shapefile, make sure the correct encoding is chosen. – MrXsquared Sep 06 '21 at 13:41
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    have you tried latin encoding? Sometimes switching helpes. – Erik Sep 06 '21 at 13:43
  • MRXsqaured what do you mean by original source? – geofee Sep 06 '21 at 14:11
  • How can I find the *.cpg file? – geofee Sep 06 '21 at 14:13
  • after saving the shapefiles with encoding UTF-8 I have a cpg-file, it contains the encoding UTF-8 but the question marks are still there – geofee Sep 06 '21 at 14:23
  • after saving a shapefile to UTF-8 there is now 1/2 for german umlaut('') no idea what I have to do now to get rid of this – geofee Sep 08 '21 at 08:55
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    Prepare a small dataset for testing and share it. – user30184 Sep 08 '21 at 10:00
  • Make sure you set the encoding when importing the file. Changing it once it's in QGIS will not help. – HeikkiVesanto Sep 08 '21 at 12:56
  • Sorry can't share the files – geofee Sep 09 '21 at 08:31
  • is this problem in the data and the column names? or just in the column names? – sn1ks Oct 19 '21 at 05:54
  • Maybe this thread https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/301383/converting-excel-into-shapefile-keeping-encoding-and-data-type can also help you – Taras Oct 19 '21 at 08:50

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If ü is being shown as ü you actually have Windows 1252 encoding not UTF-8. They overlap for some chars but not all. See https://string-functions.com/encodingtable.aspx?encoding=65001&decoding=1252 for a table of values

Craig Williams
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I had the same issue. In my case it helped switch to Windows-1250.

Helen Pater
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