[Xastir] ESRI shapefiles and dbfawk

[James Ewen]

> If there are spaces, parens, or other cruft in the value of 
> NATRDCLASS you can just wildcard things to ignore it, e.g.
>   /^NATRDCLASS=.*FREEWAY/

It's starting to become a little clearer... Each value is very different
than the next. I was thinking of only matching to the first few characters.

> I feel your pain.  I had a ton of trouble figuring out how to 
> use it myself, which is why I ended up making that tutorial 
> in the first place.  Once you get a process down it makes 
> sense and goes quickly, but it takes some doing to get there.  
> 
> Having the metadata or users guide for the data you are 
> trying to work with makes life a lot simpler.  

I'd love to have the metadata. There are a lot of links to documentation on
the metadata available on the internet, but nothing that tells you what the
fields or values are!


>it can help to use the program 'testawk' that's built 
>(but not installed) when you build xastir.

Huh? What do you mean by built but not installed?

>There is some help in README.MAPS about how to use
>testawk.  What this program will do is run your 
>dbfawk file over a shapefile and dump out the 
>various variable settings it'll use for each shape
>found.

I'll have to play with that tomorrow. It's getting a little too late to play
tonight.

I do see that I have a parsing problem with the dbfinfo line. I can't see
what's wrong there. It's simply a line with all the labels in it, separated
by colons...

>Where do you obtain your shapefiles?  I might be 
>able to help a little more if I had access to 
>the data itself.

The Canadian Government has come out of the dark ages. They have finally
released this data to the public. It can be found at www.geobase.ca. I've
got the shapefile data for the Road Network in Alberta. It's about 40MB for
the province. I'd suggest grabbing the data for Nunavut. It's a much smaller
file, since there's only about 150 miles of road network in the whole
territory.

James

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