ESRI Shapefile Technical Description
An ESRI White Paper—July 1998
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ESRI White Paper i
ESRI Shapefile Technical
Description
An ESRI White Paper
Contents Page
Why Shapefiles? 1
Shapefile Technical Description 2
Organization of the Main File 2
Main File Record Contents 5
Organization of the Index File 23
Organization of the dBASE File 25
Glossary 26
J-7855
ESRI White Paper
ESRI Shapefile Technical
Description
This document defines the shapefile (.shp) spatial data format and
describes why shapefiles are important. It lists the tools available in
Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), software for
creating shapefiles directly or converting data into shapefiles from other
formats. This document also provides all the technical information
necessary for writing a computer program to create shapefiles without the
use of ESRI
®
software for organizations that want to write their own data
translators.
Why Shapefiles?
A shapefile stores nontopological geometry and attribute information for the spatial
features in a data set. The geometry for a feature is stored as a shape comprising a set of
vector coordinates.
Because shapefiles do not have the processing overhead of a topological data structure,
they have advantages over other data sources such as faster drawing speed and edit
ability. Shapefiles handle single features that overlap or that are noncontiguous. They
also typically require less disk space and are easier to read and write.
Shapefiles can support point, line, and area features. Area features are represented as
closed loop, double-digitized polygons. Attributes are held in a dBASE
®
format file.
Each attribute record has a one-to-one relationship with the associated shape record.
How Sha
p
efiles
Can Be Created
Shapefiles can be created with the following four general methods:
ExportShapefiles can be created by exporting any data source to a shapefile using
ARC/INFO
®
, PC ARC/INFO
®
, Spatial Database Engine
™
(SDE
™
), ArcView
®
GIS,
or BusinessMAP
™
software.
DigitizeShapefiles can be created directly by digitizing shapes using ArcView GIS
feature creation tools.
ProgrammingUsing Avenue
™
(ArcView GIS), MapObjects
™
, ARC Macro
Language (AML
™
) (ARC/INFO), or Simple Macro Language (SML
™
)
(PC ARC/INFO) software, you can create shapefiles within your programs.
Write directly to the shapefile specifications by creating a program.
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