ESRI Shapefile

All varieties of ESRI Shapefiles should be available for reading, and simple 3D files can be created.

Normally the OGR Shapefile driver treats a whole directory of shapefiles as a dataset, and a single shapefile within that directory as a layer. In this case the directory name should be used as the dataset name. However, it is also possible to use one of the files (.shp, .shx or .dbf) in a shapefile set as the dataset name, and then it will be treated as a dataset with one layer.

Currently the shapefile driver always returns polygons, rather than multipolygons, even for polygons with multiple outer rings. This is a violation of the OGR (and Simple Features) data model, and will be corrected at some point in the future. The new ESRI measure values are discarded if encountered.

If a .prj files in old Arc/Info style or new ESRI OGC WKT style is present, it will be read and used to associate a projection with features.

Creation Issues

The Shapefile driver treats a directory as a dataset, and each Shapefile set (.shp, .shx, and .dbf) as a layer. The dataset name will be treated as a directory name. If the directory already exists it is used and existing files in the directory are ignored. If the directory does not exist it will be created.

As a special case attempts to create a new dataset with the extension .shp will result in a single file set being created instead of a directory.

ESRI shapefiles can only store one kind of geometry per layer (shapefile). On creation this is may be set based on the source file (if a uniform geometry type is known from the source driver), or it may be set directly by the user with the layer creation option SHPT (shown below). If not set the layer creation will fail. If geometries of incompatible types are written to the layer, the output will be terminated with an error.

Note that this can make it very difficult to translate a mixed geometry layer from another format into Shapefile format using ogr2ogr, since ogr2ogr has no support for separating out geometries from a source layer.

Shapefile feature attributes are stored in an associated .dbf file, and so attributes suffer a number of limitations:

Attribute names can only be up to 12 characters long. Longer names will be silently truncated. This may result in non-unique column names, which will definately cause problems later.
Only Integer, Real and String field types are supported. The various list, and binary field types cannot be created.
The field width and precision are directly used to establish storage size in the .dbf file. This means that strings longer than the field width, or numbers that don't fit into the indicated field format will suffer truncation.
Integer fields without an explicit width are treated as width 11.
Real (floating point) fields without an explicit width are treated as width 24 with 15 decimal places of precision.
String fields without an assigned width are treated as 80 characters.

Dataset Creation Options

None

Layer Creation Options

SHPT=type: Override the type of shapefile created. Can be one of NULL for a simple .dbf file with no .shp file, POINT, ARC, POLYGON or MULTIPOINT for 2D, or POINTZ, ARCZ, POLYGONZ or MULTIPOINTZ for 3D. Shapefiles with measure values are not supported, nor are MULTIPATCH files.

ESRI Shapefile

Creation Issues

Dataset Creation Options

Layer Creation Options

See Also