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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | Re: [gislist] Shapefile DBF Specification |
| Date: |
10/27/2005 12:25:03 PM |
| From: |
Quantitative Decisions |
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At 12:40 PM 10/27/2005 -0400, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>But in my mind it is unclear what variations of .dbf file are legal with
>shapefiles.
The behavior of ArcView 3.x has been the de facto enforcer of the shapefile
standard, because in the majority of cases shapefiles are produced for use
with AV 3.
dBase III and IV files created by most, but not all, software, will
work. Some software does not exactly conform to the .dbf specs in
apparently harmless ways (such as writing bytes in reserved portions of the
header) and ArcView 3.x usually chokes on their .dbf output--it seems
pretty finicky--, so you have to test. (It's interesting, though, that AV
will happily read and write dBase III/IV files that contain duplicate field
names, something which I believe is invalid according to the spec.) The
dBase III and IV files produced by any recent version of Excel (going back
to '95) are ok. I recall AV does not read dBase V files. I have not
tested with dBase II files but don't expect those to work, either. AV does
not read dBase memo (.dbt) files nor does it read the various index files
(such as those developed for FoxBase/FoxPro, Clipper, or the original dBase).
It's useful to know that AV ignores the deletion bytes in the dBase file
records: it reads them all, whether they're marked as deleted or not.
--Bill Huber
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