Web Mapping Illustrated

Name

ESRI Shapefiles (SHP)

Synopsis

Also known as ESRI ArcView. ESRI is the company that introduced this format; ArcView was the first product to use shapefiles.

File listing

Shapefiles are made up of a minimum of three similarly named files, with different suffixes:

Countries_area.dbf

Countries_area.shp

Countries_area.shx

Data access/connection method

• Shapefile access is built directly into MapServer. It is also available through OGR, but direct access without OGR is recommended and discussed here.

• The path to the shapefile is required. No file extension should be specified.

• Shapefiles hold only one layer of data, therefore no distinction needs to be made.

ogrinfo examples

• The directory can serve as a data source.

• Each shapefile in a directory serves as a layer.

• A shapefile can also be a data source. In this case the layer has the same prefix as the shapefile.

Here's an example that uses ogrinfo on a directory with multiple shapefiles:

                  > ogrinfo /data/shapefiles/
    INFO: Open of '/data/shapefiles/'
    using driver 'ESRI Shapefile' successful.
    1: wpg_h2o (Line String)
    2: wpg_roads (Line String)
    3: wpg_roads_dis (Line String)
    4: wpgrestaurants (Point)

Here's an example that uses ogrinfo on a single shapefile:

                  > ogrinfo /data/shapefiles/Countries_area.shp
    Had to open data source read-only.
    INFO: Open of 'Countries_area.shp'
    using driver 'ESRI Shapefile' successful.
    1: Countries_area (Polygon)

Here's an example that uses ogrinfo to examine the structure of the file/layer:

                  > ogrinfo -summary /data/shapefiles/Countries_area.shp ...