The directory names for the download is really awful. The Tiger people embedded the state, state name, county, county type and county number in the darn thing, and used non-standard naming conventions (which I guess for them are standard now), so trying to automate the download is a royal pain in the you know where.
If you start from the state download, then use that to get counties, then use the namelsad to get the individual files, that sort of works, except for Puerto Rico, which uses non-English characters in the shapefiles but only English characters in the directory names. Very funny Tiger people! I'm still laughing. The new MTFCC code doesn't have a corresponding table to explain what the codes are. You'll have to go to the documentation, text version, and create a table from that. Why they didn't just make a table out of it for downloading is beyond me. As for place names, another headache. The old Tiger format had a table (was it the 5 record?) that contained all codes and the names for them. The new one skips this and leaves us to figure it out. The documentation makes note that the codes are in the FIPS55 pubs, but they are both in UTF8 and UTF16 (AK, HI), so trying to combine them is a real pain. Turns out the FIPS55 pubs are missing a number of the place codes in the shapefiles, so the best way to derive a placefp to place name table is to download the "places" shapefiles and use the name field in those tables instead. This should have been referenced in the docs instead of leaving the developers to figure it out. Would have saved me a number of hours playing with the screwed up and outdated FIPS55 pubs. -John Coryat http://maps.huge.info http://www.usnaviguide.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
