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The real annoying thing is that one of the reasons shapefiles are so bad, and so hard to replace is they fill a bunch of niches in a half assed way and no sane
by cwmma 8y ago
The real annoying thing is that one of the reasons shapefiles are so bad, and so hard to replace is they fill a bunch of niches in a half assed way and no sane replacement format is going to replace shapefile in all situations.
Need a standardized way to disseminate data that's super easy to ingest? GeoJSON and KML work great there, while GeoPackage is going to be not a great fit for things like APIs plus you can't do a streaming read.
Need a way to edit and work with data locally and maybe send stuff around your office? Geopackage is going to be a much better fit then GeoJSON or KML.
- dagw 8y agoAnother 'hidden' feature of shape files that I've seen regularly abused (and abused myself more than once) is that they use the standard dBASE format to store their data. Meaning that all kinds of apps that know nothing about shape files (like Excel or Access) can be used to read and analyse the data stored within them.
- cwmma 8y agoalso the encoding of the database is stored in a file that ends in `.cpg` which I'm pretty sure stands for code page. Source: I wrote a shapefile parser and generator.