Accessing "GIS (ESRI shape file)" files from Python ?

[Richard Shea]

Hi - As usual having Python is making me consider doing things I
wouldn't normally !

I've come across some files described as "GIS version (ESRI shape
file)" which consitute an electronic map of the Wellington, New
Zealand. There are six files in the package :

suburbs.shx
suburbs.prj
suburbs.sbn
suburbs.sbx
suburbs.shp
suburbs.shp.xml
suburbs.dbf

Can anyone tell me - is there, freely available, existing software
accessible from Python which would allow me to read these files ? One
thing I'm particularly interested to discover is if they contain
contour (altitude) information so ideally that's that the sort of
thing I would extract - but I'm just generally curious and wanting to
educate myself a little in this area.

In case it needs saying my knowledge of GIS is ... light ;-) but I'm
interested to discover a little more.


thanks

richard shea.

 

[Sean Richards]

http://thuban.intevation.org/

I have not used this but it purports to be able to read ESRI shapefiles
and is written in Python + wxPython. If you are not totally dogmatic
about using Python then you could just download ESRI's arcexplorer which
seemed pretty useful when I used it several years ago

Sean

 

[Richard Shea]

That's great - thanks very much just downloading Thuban now.

thanks again.

richard shea.

 

[Khalid Zuberi]

That's great - thanks very much just downloading Thuban now.

thanks again.

richard shea.

And if that doesn't work out, you might also try:

http://openev.sourceforge.net/

which appears to have ESRI Shapefile support, and to be
scriptable in python.

- Khalid

 

[geospatialpython]

Python Shapefile Library

You can use the Python Shapefile Library hosted on Google Code:

code.google.com/p/pyshp

This library has no dependencies other than the Python Standard Library. In addition to the documentation on the project site you can find usage examples at GeospatialPython.com.

NOTE: Most libraries will only deal with the shp, shx, and dbf files in that collection.