[gdal-dev] Overcome attribute name limitation in shapefiles

[Felix Obermaier]

Peter,

why would it cease to respect the dBaseIV Standard? I’m not proposing a change regarding the dBase format but an additional file that gives additional information the data in the attribute column. If you don’t supply that file you don’t have the additinal information, but you still can access the data and have to figure out by yourself what it is.

I know that there are other data sources that are not limited in the size for column names that I can use. But often I’m asked „Can you provide me a Shapefile“ and then I’m sometimes stuck with column names that are abbreviated to undistinctness.
Or I get a shapefile of that kind, which does not make it any better.

Felix

Von: Peter Halls [mailto:p.halls at york.ac.uk]
Gesendet: Montag, 6. März 2017 14:56
An: Felix Obermaier <obe at IVV-AACHEN.DE>; gdal dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Betreff: Re: [gdal-dev] Overcome attribute name limitation in shapefiles

Felix,
      following your proposal would make Shapefiles cease to respect the dBaseIV Standard and potentially seriously affect their interchangability.  There are a range of alternative formats supported by GDAL that achieve your goal: for example, I use SQL as my base format and only convert when necessary.  SQL is generally accepted by other packages and is far more flexible than dBaseIV.
Best wishes,
Peter

On 6 March 2017 at 13:26, Felix Obermaier <obe at ivv-aachen.de<mailto:obe at ivv-aachen.de>> wrote:
Hello,

is it somehow possible to overcome the attribute name length limitiation of DBase files using GDAL? If so, how?

If not, why not add (another) file the shapefile dataset of shapes (shp, shx), projection (prj), data (dbf) and encoding(cpg), one that is (re-) defining the column names, allowing for

  *   mixed casing,
  *   non-ASCII characters,
  *   more than 10/11 characters

I’m aware of a software product that does it this way. The file that renames the columns is set up like a CSV file defining two columns, „Name“ and „Alias“. „Name“ is the actual name of the column, „Alias“ the name in the dbase file header.

Felix Obermaier

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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter J Halls, Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit (PRDU),
                      University of York

Snail mail: c/o Research Centre for the Social Sciences (RCSS),
        University of York,
        Heslington, York YO10 5DD

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