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ReadingWritingFiles.md

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GeoPandas 0.4.0 Reading and Writing Files

  1. Reading Spatial Data
  2. Writing Spatial Data

Reading Spatial Data

  • geopandas can read almost any vector-based spatial data format including ESRI shapefile, GeoJSON files and more using the command: geopandas.read_file() which returns a GeoDataFrame object.

  • This is possible because geopandas makes use of the great fiona library, which in turn makes use of a massive open-source program called GDAL/OGR designed to facilitate spatial data transformations.

  • Any arguments passed to read_file() after the file name will be passed directly to fiona.open, which does the actual data importation.

  • In general, read_file() is pretty smart and should do what you want without extra arguments, but for more help, type:


import fiona; help(fiona.open)

  • Among other things, one can explicitly set the driver (shapefile, GeoJSON) with the driver keyword, or pick a single layer from a multi-layered file with the layer keyword.

  • Where supported in fiona, geopandas can also load resources directly from a web URL, for example for GeoJSON files from geojson.xyz:


url = "http://d2ad6b4ur7yvpq.cloudfront.net/naturalearth-3.3.0/ne_110m_land.geojson"
df = geopandas.read_file(url)

geopandas can also get data from a PostGIS database using the read_postgis() command.

Writing Spatial Data

GeoDataFrames can be exported to many different standard formats using the GeoDataFrame.to_file() method. For a full list of supported formats, type import fiona; fiona.supported_drivers.