Character encoding for US Census Cartographic Boundary Files
Question: I'm trying to import the US Census cartographic boundary files (available
here: <http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/bdy_files.html> ) into a GeoDjango
application. However, python is complaining about UnicodeDecodeErrors (for
example, for the non-ascii characters in Puerto Rico).

The shapefile description file (*.dbf) doesn't specify what character encoding
it uses; this is not defined by the spec for shapefiles. What is the correct
character encoding to use?


Answer: I was having the same issue with CBSA and Place data from 2010 Census full
geometry shapes. These are not the clipped carto files.

IBM850 Did not work correctly for me. On a whim, I tried latin1 and it worked
perfectly.

