Empty Shapefile after MMQGIS attribute join from CSV file

Question

I've been trying to use the Attribute Join from CSV File function in MMQGIS, but it does not seem to work in Version 2.0.1. I've tried to join the same CSV and Shapefiles using V.2.0.1 running under both Ubuntu and Windows 7.

In each case, the procedure runs but returns no matches. It creates a new shapefile, but the file is empty. The same procedure with the same files works under QGIS 1.7.5.

Is this a known bug?

Answer 1

Regarding the Attribute Join from CSV File on http://michaelminn.com/linux/mmqgis/ it says that "CSV files must be encoded in the UTF-8 character set. Although other 8-bit encodings (like Windoze ISO-8859-x) will work if only ASCII characters are present, non-ASCII characters may cause unpredictable behavior".

Could this be your case?

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To see / set your character set encoding you can use Notepad++ like below:

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• Doug: I thought about this but am not sure how to tell what format the CSV is in. I tried opening and saving it in both MS and open source spreadsheet programs, but this didn't make any difference. I was able to do the join using the same files in mmqgis running in QGIS 1.7.5, which makes me thing it's probably not a file encoding problem.
• Sorin Călinică: That's why I insist to assure yourself that you use UTF-8. Older plugin versions doesn't work with QGIS 2.0.1 and they don't have the reported issue when using with older QGIS versions.
• Doug: You were right, the csv file was US-ASCII, not UTF-8. However, when I converted it using the iconf command, the CSV file was totally garbled and MMQGIS returned an error message for a bad file. Still, it gives me a start towards solving the problem. Thanks!
• Sorin Călinică: Try in Notepad++. It should not spoil anything.