[postgis-users] Size of FTDate field in dbf files

[Peter Hopfgartner]

Dear mailing list members,

we had some problems when editing shape files containing dates generated 
with pgsql2shp. In particular, editing these files with ArcGIS and some 
OS desptop GIS (QGIS or OpenJump, sorry I can't remember exactly) the 
attributes where shifted by some white spaces.

Looking at the files generated with pgsql2shp, we noted that  a length 
of 10 bytes is assigned to date fields (see also current the svn 
snapshot, loader/pgsql2shp.c:2735,2736), in apparent contrast with the 
dbf file format specification 
(http://www.dbase.com/knowledgebase/int/db7_file_fmt.htm), which 
specifies that these field are 8 bytes long.

Best regards,

Peter Hopfgartner and Sergio Segala
R3 GIS

http://www.r3-gis.com