Converting the route to a shapefile

The raster version of the least cost path route is useful for visualization, but it isn’t very good for analysis because it is embedded in the raster, and it is, therefore, difficult to relate to other datasets as we have done so many other times in this book. Our next goal will be to use the path data that we saved when creating the route to create a shapefile since the saved data is in the proper order. The following code will convert our raster path to a shapefile that is easier to use in a GIS for analysis:

1. First, let’s import the necessary modules. We’ll need pickle to load the previously saved path, getline from linecache to read the header information from a file, and shapefile to write shapefiles:

   import pickle
   from linecache import getline
   import shapefile

2. Next, we define a function named pix2coord to convert pixel coordinates to real-world coordinates. This function takes in three parameters: gt for geotransform...