Inspecting vector files
We can use ogrinfo to get more detailed information about a layer in a vector data file.
By passing the name of a layer, and using the -so flag, we can ask ogrinfo to display summary information about a layer.
$ ogrinfo -so countries/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp ne_10m_admin_0_countries
INFO: Open of `countries/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp'
using driver `ESRI Shapefile' successful.
Layer name: ne_10m_admin_0_countries
Geometry: Polygon
Feature Count: 255
Extent: (-180.000000, -90.000000) - (180.000000, 83.634101)
Layer SRS WKT:
GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",
DATUM["WGS_1984",
SPHEROID["WGS_84",6378137.0,298.257223563]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]]
scalerank: Integer (4.0)
featurecla: String (30.0)
LABELRANK: Real (6.2)
SOVEREIGNT: String (32.0)
SOV_A3: String (3.0)
ADM0_DIF: Real (4.2)
...
Some basic infomation is given (the geometry, boundary extent, the spatial reference system).
You can also see that file contains 255 features, and for each feature the following information is listed.
- the name of the feature
- its type
Integer,String,Real, etc. - its length
Just to be clear, here's one of the lines with the pieces annotated:
name type length
| | |
scalerank: Integer (4.0)