to many characters in .dbf file?
On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Michael Denslow wrote:
Dear r-sig-geo, I am in a bit of a bind. I am trying to write a shape file using writeOGR() in rgdal. I just realized that I may have too many characters in the cells as they are getting cut off when the shape file is created. The cells are unchanged in the SpatialPointsDataFrame. But when I inspect the .dbf they are all truncated. The cells that are cut off contain literature citations, so some are very long (hundreds of characters). Is there a solution to this problem? This shape file is being imported into Geoserver so I am some what limited as to the formats that I can use.
The OGR driver truncates (I think to 254 characters), so use writeSpatialShape() in maptools instead, passing your large number through the max_nchar= argument. Please read the details in ?write.dbf - field widths above 254 are not portable. Roger
Any advice? Thanks in advance, Michael
Roger Bivand Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43 e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no