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Posted by PJ Halls on July 13, 2005, 8:00 am
Please log in for more thread options Alex wrote:
>
> hello everyone,
> I have a problem with handling shapefiles. Those files contain
> information about roads, some attributes are accessible in DBF files,
> where I can find such information as road name, section, ... and also
> information to which part of the road some section belong, ... But
> there is no attribute like lon/lat or some kind of coordinates I need
> to use in other software, actually for some kind of selfmade web
> application. I know that there is somewhere information I need because
> ArcMap programm has an utility to show "real" coordinates. How do I
> get these "real" coords? Do I have to write an utility for extraction
> geometry data from shapefiles directly?
> PS. I am a newbie to GIS, be patient :)
A 'shapefile' actually comprises at least three, interlinked, files - of
types shp, shx and dbf. You have found the attribute data in the dbf
file, for each record there there is a record in the shp file that holds
the coordinate data.
You have already been pointed to ESRI's descriptive White Paper: do read
that. There are two (related) Open Source libraries available to help a
programmer who must manage these data: shapelib and gdal (which offers a
wide range of other spatial formats in addition). Get gdal from
www.gdal.org.
Best wishes,
Peter
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