[Mapserver-dev] shpxy documentation

[Paul Spencer]

Steve,

is there any documentation on [shpxy]?  I've looked at the source but 
some things are not obvious to me.  Specifically what I am looking for 
is information about the following:

ph,pf - part header, part footer - what is a part?  In a multi-ring 
polygon, would this be each ring?

I am trying to turn polygons from a query into something to use in 
searching a postgis database so I am doing something like:

[shpxy yf=","]

to produce a list of comma separated coords (that are internally space 
separated):

x1 y1,x2 y2,x3 y3,

but I always end up with an extra , at the end.  Is it possible to 
optionally avoid footers on the last element processed (or optionally 
avoid headers on the first one)?

After stripping the trailing comma, I turn this into a string for postgis:

"GeometryFromText( 'POLYGON((<coords>))', -1 )"

 From what I understand above, though, I should be accomodating possible 
situations like multi-ring polygons with

[shpxy ph="(" pf=")" yf=","]

which could produce

"GeometryFromText( 'POLYGON((<coords part 1>)(<coords part 2>))', -1 )"

which produces the problem of having the extra commas in nasty to 
process places (search for ,) and replace with ) which is expensive).

Comments welcome :)

Paul

-- 
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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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