OGR

We touched on OGR as a way to handle WKT strings, but its real power is as a universal vector library. This book strives for pure Python solutions, but no single library even comes close to the variety of formats that OGR can process.

OGR is contained in the GDAL library, which we can install with conda:

conda install gdal

Let’s read an example point shapefile using the OGR Python API. The example shapefile can be downloaded as a ZIP file from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/point.zip.

This point shapefile has five points with single-digit, positive coordinates. The attributes list the order in which the points were created, making it useful for testing. This simple example will read in the point shapefile and loop through each feature; then, it will print the x and y values of each point, plus the value of the first attribute field:

from osgeo import ogr
shp = ogr.Open("point.shp")
layer = shp.GetLayer()
for feature in layer...