I’m having issues with populated_places version 3.0.0.
The fields “name” and “name_ascii” are identical and “ADM1NAME” contains an invalid ASCII rendering of the Province name. For example, ADM1 “Río Negro” in URY is correctly named “Río Negro” in admin1_provinces_and_states but incorrectly rendered as “RRo Negro” in populated_places.
It looks as though admin1_provinces_and_states was more carefully produced for version 3 than populated places. There, the DBF file is now UTF-8 encoded and fields such as “name” have correct non-ascii characters.
If the NaturalEarth team still has the original UTF-8 names of populated places, they should produce a version where the field NAME1ASCII remains unchanged but NAME uses Unicode just as admi1_provinces_and_states does.
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