Special characters in the path

[Pitti999]

First of all. I aint no ekspert in Qgis or Grass gis, i'm just an employee who is trying to solve a program, in a program I have no knowledge about.

We are a company located i Denmark, wich means we use some special characters in our alphabet. Æ Ø Å. Some people also have thesse characters in their name. This is creating some problems in the path Grass gis is using, when launcing the program when Ø becomes ø

Starting GRASS GIS...
WARNING: Concurrent mapset locking is not supported on Windows
access: No such file or directory
ERROR: LOCATION
<C:\Users\Søren\Documents\grassdata\world_latlong_wgs84> not
available
access: No such file or directory
ERROR: LOCATION
<C:\Users\Søren\Documents\grassdata\world_latlong_wgs84> not
available

The directory in question is at it's location in Documents.

C:\Users\Søren\Documents\grassdata\world_latlong_wgs84

I know you can somehow change that path with LOCATION command in the terminal, but that leads to other problems in the program as well.

Does anyone know of a solution to this?

Thanks in advance, :)

[echoix]

The easy solution when getting path problems, not the one you want to hear, is to use short, « web safe » names. That means, short, no spaces, no accents, and even sometimes limit uppercase/lowercase. I speak French as a mother tongue, so I find it as much disrespectful to not be able to use all accents correctly, like made possible if using utf-8.

The reality is, especially on windows, the old DOS console has some limitations and uses different encodings. Same limitations as the old times, and same associated problems too. I think it is possible since windows 8 to set the system encoding for this to utf-8. But it was experimental from what I remember. I don’t know if it is possible for you to play with (and be comfortable with too) on a work-controlled computer

[marisn]

The easy solution when getting path problems, not the one you want to hear, is to use short, « web safe » names.

Which doesn't work if your work place has set up users in AD to have your name, surname as an user name. Long time a go I also had to occasionally use windows and my name gave a lot of headache. See old trac tickets and ML archive. After a lot of exploration of options, only viable one I found was to ditch Windows completely.

Why it is a problem for GRASS and not other programs? It is a problem for any program that is not in a full control of its environment and GRASS isn't as it calls other programs via CMD and thus is at a mercy of whatever CMD is set up to handle. Yes, there are things that could be improved – pull requests welcome (but keep an eye also on bugs in Python). According to Wikipedia, there are some experimental options you can enable in Windows, but no guarantees.

TL;DR – just change your name or move to any modern OS (Linux, MacOS, ...).

[nilason]

It is a problem with "special" (non-ascii) characters and spaces with using GRASS (and other non-native Windows applications). I'm not aware of other solution (currently) than to install on a location with a-z characters in path.

[Pitti999]

So GrassGis comes with the installation of Qgis, and at first launch, it puts a map on this path "C:\Users%USERNAME%\Documents\grassdata\world_latlong_wgs84" We can change that path, and get GrassGis to launch, but then the problems is with Python scripts.

If we install Qgis on a parth with only a-z characters in the path: does that work with GrassGis aswell?

[nilason]

It should work then, as far as I know.

[nilason]

We can change that path, and get GrassGis to launch, but then the problems is with Python scripts.

The GRASS’ internals and commands all depend on the path where they are located (installed).