[Qgis-user] shapefile/dbf number limitation?

[William Kyngesburye]

On Apr 17, 2012, at 3:58 PM, John C. Tull wrote:

> On Apr 17, 2012, at 1:18 PM, William Kyngesburye wrote:
> 
>> I'm adding some real number fields to a shapefile and QGIS only lets me set up to 5 decimal digits.  I would like more.  Is this intentional or is something broken?
> 
> Hi William,
> 
> Are you hitting the normal shapefile limitations, or is this unique to QGIS shapefile handling? See the table in the link below.
> 
> http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Geoprocessing_considerations_for_shapefile_output
> 
It's not a shapefile (DBF) limitation.  I can convert a postgis feature with a double real field to shapefile (ogr2ogr) and get a 24.12 formatted number in the DBF, and QGIS will even display the field info as such.

I think the info in that ESRI attribute limitations table is specific to how Arc converts geodb fields to shapefile.  According to the shapefile specs, any field type supported in the DBF format is valid.

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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