Importing Arc/Info Export files

[dww]

On Fri, 22 Sep 1995, R.Kunkel wrote:

This seems to come up quite often, so I'm replying to the list. Sorry if
it's boring.

> Does anybody know about a possibility to import Arc/INFO vector files written
> in EXPORT format into GRASS? Alternatively, are any documentations about the
> ARC/INFO EXPORT format available?

So far as I know (and that's not all that much!) GRASS will not read the
ARC/INFO export format (which are files with .e00 endings) directly.

However, GRASS will read ARC/INFO ungenerate format vector files, and 
rebuild the topology of the vector coverage. When someone gave me e00
files which I needed to get into GRASS, I borrowed an ARC account and
did the following:

In ARC:

1) imported the e00 files, recreating the cover (command is someting
   like "import cover <name of e00 file> <cover name>")
2) did "ungenerate line <cover name> <file for lines>"
3) did "ungenerate label <cover name> <file for labels>"
4) went to INFO and exported <cover name>.PAT as an sdf file making
   sure that it contained the label point id's, and any attributes
   that I wanted in grass.
5) changed all the commas in the sdf file to spaces, which is what
   grass expects!

This produces three ascii files which contain pretty much all the
information in the ARC coverage. These three files have to be put
somewhere special ($location/arc I think - but read the man page
for v.in.arc ...)

In Grass:
1) run v.in.arc giving the lines file, label points files and text
   files produced above, and telling it what columns in the exported
   .PAT files are label point ID's etc.
2) run v.support
3) if there aren't any errors, it's probably worked. Try d.vect and
   v.to.rast to be sure.

David Wheatley 
Department of Archaeology,
University of Southampton,
Highfield, Southampton, S017 1BJ