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Importing a DBF containing X-Y Values into QGIS

January 29, 2011 Spatial Galaxy

Suppose you have a DBF (.dbf) file containing X and Y values that you want to import and save as a spatial layer.

QGIS doesn’t support direct import of a DBF file as a map layer, however, we can use some command line magic to convert it to a CSV file and then use the Delimited Text plugin to get the job done.

Your DBF file should have an id for each record and fields containing X and Y values. If it has additional fields that should be OK as well.

First convert the DBF to a comma delimited file using ogr2ogr:
ogr2ogr -f CSV my_csv my_data.dbf

If you don’t have ogr2ogr see http://www.gdal.org/index.html.

This will create my_data.csv in the my_csv directory. You are now ready to bring it into QGIS.

Here are the steps to import the CSV:

  1. Start QGIS
  2. If not already enabled, use the plugin manager to enable the Delimited Text plugin
  3. Click on the Delimited Text icon in the Plugin toolbar or choose it from the Plugins menu
  4. Browse to the location of your CSV file
  5. Enter a name for the layer
  6. Under Selected delimiters, check Comma
  7. If your X and Y fields aren’t automatically determined, set them using the drop-down boxes
  8. The sample text should show how the file is being parsed—if it looks right click OK, otherwise adjust the settings
  9. The layer is added to QGIS

Delmited Text plugin ready to import CSV

At this point the layer behaves pretty much like any other QGIS layer. To save it as a shapefile, right click on its name in the legend and choose Save as…

by Gary Sherman at 7:49 PM under dbf , gdal , ogr , ogr2ogr , qgis , quantum gis (Comments)

GDAL/OGR 1.8.0 Released

January 25, 2011 Anita Graser

The 1.8.0 release is a major new feature release with the following highlights:

  • New GDAL drivers: GTX, HF2, JPEGLS, JP2OpenJPEG, JPIPKAK, KMLSUPEROVERLAY, LOS/LAS, MG4Lidar, NTv2, OZI, PDF, RASDAMAN, XYZ
  • New OGR drivers: AeronavFAA, ArcObjects , GPSBabel, HTF, LIBKML, MSSQLSpatial, NAS, OpenAir, PDS, PGDump, SOSI, SUA, WFS
  • Significantly improved OGR drivers: DXF, GML
  • New implemented RFCs
  • New utility: gdallocationinfo

More complete information on the new features and fixes can be found in the GDAL/OGR 1.8.0 Release News.


by underdark at 9:16 PM under gdal , gis , ogr (Comments)

Batch convert a directory of tiffs to ecw

December 11, 2009 Linfiniti

Today I wanted to batch convert a directory of .tiff images to .ecw (MrSid wavelet compressed). Our server has 8 cores so it would be nice to use them all right?

Here is the quick & dirty way I do this kind of job in parallel.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir ecw
for FILE in *.tif
do
  BASENAME=$(basename $FILE .tif)
  OUTFILE=ecw/${BASENAME}.ecw
  echo "Processing: ${BASENAME}.tif"
  if [ -f $OUTFILE ] #skip if exists
  then
    echo "Skipping: $OUTFILE"
  else
    /usr/local/bin/gdal_translate -of ECW -co LARGE_OK=YES $FILE $OUTFILE
  fi
done

The script is extremely simple and is set up so that you can run it multiple times without problems because if looks to see if the output file already exists before trying to write it. If it does exist, it skips straight on to the next image.

To run 8 parallel processes I simply do this at the command prompt (I did mine in a screen session):

./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &
./toecw &

Afterwards you can fire up top and watch 'em go!

top - 18:21:04 up  6:41,  4 users,  load average: 10.29, 9.83, 6.69
Tasks: 216 total,   1 running, 215 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  : 56.5%us, 22.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 15.7%id,  4.9%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  : 53.3%us, 31.6%sy,  0.0%ni,  8.9%id,  6.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  : 50.7%us, 37.5%sy,  0.0%ni,  4.9%id,  6.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  : 46.6%us, 38.4%sy,  0.0%ni,  4.9%id,  9.8%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu4  : 44.0%us, 29.8%sy,  0.0%ni,  8.7%id, 17.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu5  : 30.7%us, 57.4%sy,  0.0%ni,  1.7%id,  9.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.7%si,  0.0%st
Cpu6  : 58.3%us, 23.8%sy,  0.0%ni,  9.4%id,  8.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu7  : 46.1%us, 38.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 10.1%id,  4.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.7%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  16227956k total, 16144508k used,    83448k free,  1739140k buffers
Swap: 62492832k total,        0k used, 62492832k free, 13383020k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
12717 timlinux  18  -2  197m  85m 5384 D  104  0.5   0:55.49 gdal_translate
12536 timlinux  18  -2  171m  77m 5384 S  102  0.5   1:08.95 gdal_translate
12705 timlinux  18  -2  195m  65m 5384 D  100  0.4   0:52.58 gdal_translate
12737 timlinux  18  -2  194m  64m 5384 D   97  0.4   0:40.78 gdal_translate
12549 timlinux  18  -2  195m 103m 5384 S   95  0.7   1:12.68 gdal_translate
12751 timlinux  18  -2  165m  66m 5384 S   88  0.4   0:37.46 gdal_translate
12561 timlinux  18  -2  166m  67m 5384 D   69  0.4   1:03.91 gdal_translate
12528 timlinux  18  -2  164m  65m 5384 S   16  0.4   0:18.24 gdal_translate

One thing to note - I ran this with the data sitting on a storage array - if your data all lives on a single drive you may have serious IO issues doing the above....

by Tim Sutton at 4:19 PM under ecw , gdal , tiff

Extracting bands from hdf4_eos to tif

November 26, 2009 Linfiniti

Here is a quick and dirty bash script I wrote to extract all bands from a modis image and save each to a tiff file. The saved bands are named after the sub layer in the original hdf4 file. The script actually generates a second script called batch.sh so you can peek in there to see the undelying gdal_translate commands that are generated.

One day I need to get around to letting QGIS natively support HDF - maybe a good topic for those attending the OSGEO hackfest in NY?

#!/bin/bash
#Set field separator to linefeeds rather than spaces
echo "#!/bin/bash" > batch.sh
chmod +x batch.sh
IFS=$'\n'
for FILE in *.hdf
do
  echo $FILE
  LAYERS=$(gdalinfo $FILE | grep SUBDATASET | grep NAME  | sed 's/[A-Z0-9\_]*=//g')
  for LAYER in $LAYERS
  do
    LAYER=$(echo $LAYER | sed 's/  //g')
    NEWFILE=$(echo $LAYER | \
    sed 's/  //g' | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/ //g'| sed 's/:/./g' ).tif
    CMD="gdal_translate -of GTiff '${LAYER}' $NEWFILE"
    echo $CMD >> batch.sh
  done
done

exec ./batch.sh

by Tim Sutton at 3:19 PM under gdal
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