Peter,

why would it cease to respect the dBaseIV Standard? I’m not proposing a change 
regarding the dBase format but an additional file that gives additional 
information the data in the attribute column. If you don’t supply that file you 
don’t have the additinal information, but you still can access the data and 
have to figure out by yourself what it is.

I know that there are other data sources that are not limited in the size for 
column names that I can use. But often I’m asked „Can you provide me a 
Shapefile“ and then I’m sometimes stuck with column names that are abbreviated 
to undistinctness.
Or I get a shapefile of that kind, which does not make it any better.

Felix

Von: Peter Halls [mailto:[email protected]]
Gesendet: Montag, 6. März 2017 14:56
An: Felix Obermaier <[email protected]>; gdal dev <[email protected]>
Betreff: Re: [gdal-dev] Overcome attribute name limitation in shapefiles

Felix,
      following your proposal would make Shapefiles cease to respect the 
dBaseIV Standard and potentially seriously affect their interchangability.  
There are a range of alternative formats supported by GDAL that achieve your 
goal: for example, I use SQL as my base format and only convert when necessary. 
 SQL is generally accepted by other packages and is far more flexible than 
dBaseIV.
Best wishes,
Peter

On 6 March 2017 at 13:26, Felix Obermaier 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello,

is it somehow possible to overcome the attribute name length limitiation of 
DBase files using GDAL? If so, how?

If not, why not add (another) file the shapefile dataset of shapes (shp, shx), 
projection (prj), data (dbf) and encoding(cpg), one that is (re-) defining the 
column names, allowing for

  *   mixed casing,
  *   non-ASCII characters,
  *   more than 10/11 characters

I’m aware of a software product that does it this way. The file that renames 
the columns is set up like a CSV file defining two columns, „Name“ and „Alias“. 
„Name“ is the actual name of the column, „Alias“ the name in the dbase file 
header.

Felix Obermaier

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Peter J Halls, Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit (PRDU),
                      University of York

Snail mail: c/o Research Centre for the Social Sciences (RCSS),
        University of York,
        Heslington, York YO10 5DD

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