CODEWITHSUNDEEP
filegisextractshapes
JuanPablo
JuanPablo

Reputation: 24754

shape file (GIS) to text

How I can convert a shape file (GIS) to text?
or, How I can extract the information in a shape file?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 9508

Answers (10)

Sharma Aashish
Sharma Aashish

Reputation: 43

If you are really in need of only the content in the shapefile., then looking for the .dbf file would give you a better view. You can directly open ".dbf" file with any excel viewer to look for the content in the shapefile.

Upvotes: 0

WencelF
WencelF

Reputation: 101

You can open dbf file and copy content to another format, for example odt or XLSX.

For open dbf file recommend to use LibreOffice Calc

Upvotes: 0

kmcguire
kmcguire

Reputation: 904

You can find most of the shp (Shape File) format detailed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile. The full specification is here: http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf.

The shp file format is very simple, but be careful to mind that the length fields are for 16-bit words not 8-bit words. If you forget this you will spend a bit of time debugging what is going wrong when trying to parse out the records.

The dbf generally contains information associated with each shape. You can also parse the dbf file but you will have to roll your own reader. I have done it before, but the easiest may be to load the dbf up into some spreadsheet application and then save it as a csv file then load that. Also, if I remember correctly you have to be careful as some of the sites out there detailing the dbf can be a little off. It had something to do with a different version where some fields are a little different. So if you are rolling your own and you get stuck be mindful that you may be reading it correctly but it is differing from the specification you are using. I think the solution was that was to return to Google and search up some different docs and finally detailed the version I was reading.

The shp and dbf are linked by the record index. The first record in the shp is linked with the first record in the dbf and so forth.

You can fairly easily find format specifications for dbf such as here: http://www.clicketyclick.dk/databases/xbase/format/index.html. If you are willing to roll your own it will not be too much of a project.

In any regard no matter if you choose to roll your own reader for dbf or shp you will need to be mindful of the fields as some are big and others little endian byte ordering. I think this only applies to the shp file.

Upvotes: 0

BexERoss
BexERoss

Reputation: 5

If you are using arcGIS and the shapefile is composed of several files you can try just opening the .dbf file in excel and saving it into another format (e.g. csv)- I've done this plenty of times and haven't had any ill effects and its a pretty quick and easy method of converting your shapefiles or doing any drastic edits saving as csv then reimporting them back into GIS for saving as a new shapefile. I will say this is and inelegant solution though ;)

Upvotes: 0

Gary Huckabone
Gary Huckabone

Reputation: 412

There is a web page to view the contents: http://webprocessresults.com/pgsActv/ShpDump.aspx

The same site offers a free desktop (windows) version: http://webprocessresults.com/svcs/FreeStuff/FreeStuff.aspx

Upvotes: 0

Tonny
Tonny

Reputation: 285

Try to use MyGeodata GIS Data Formats and Corrdinate systems Converter - online. It uses OGR library mentioned here and alows to convert most used GIS formats to any other GIS format - so for you for example from ESRI ShapeFile to GeoJSON, GML, CSV or other text-based formats.

Upvotes: 1

jjrdk
jjrdk

Reputation: 1892

I wrote a small app that can convert your shapefile to KML. Not exactly text but human readable and shareable across map applications. http://www.reimers.dk/files/folders/google_maps/entry328.aspx

Upvotes: 1

dassouki
dassouki

Reputation: 6366

look into Gdal/ogr bindings

Upvotes: 1

deinst
deinst

Reputation: 18782

If you are willing to write some code (and you will probably need to anyway as there is quite a bit of information in a shapefile, not all of it of interest for any given application) check out shapelib. It has bindings to many scripting languages. It also builds dbfdump which is an executable for dumpint the dbffiles and shpdump that dumps the shp files.

Also of interest if you program in R is the maptools package.

Upvotes: 2

wmil
wmil

Reputation: 3189

Mapwindow (http://mapwindow.org/) is free, open source, and has a convert shp to csv feature.

The csv files it produces are a little strange, but you should be able to manage.

Windows only.

Upvotes: 2

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