[OSM-talk] osmlib osm-export shp column name size limit?

Jon Burgess jburgess777 at googlemail.com
Sun Nov 16 12:26:15 GMT 2008


On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 22:17 -0800, David Carmean wrote:
> Playing with Jochen's Ruby osmlib for the past couple of hours; 
> trying to convert osm to shapefiles.  I find that the column names 
> I configure in the "setup" section are truncated to ten characters.  
> 
> Has anyone else run into this?  This is osmlib 0.1.3.

It looks like an inherent limit in the shapefile format. Shapefiles
store the column data in a DBF format file which only supports 10
characters for each field name:

from http://www.dbf2002.com/dbf-file-format.html

"Field Subrecords Structure
Byte offset 0 - 10
Field name width with a maximum of 10 characters. If less than 10, it is
padded with null characters (0x00)."

	Jon






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