[GRASS-dev] table only creation in v.in.ascii

Does anyone know what the restrictions on DBF field
names are? Length?

8 chars

Add 2:

"DBF column names are limited to 10 characters (DBF API definition)" [1]

That's really cool, because this says it's 12:

http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_shapefile.html

(And I am pretty sure I saw 13 on some other page .. what a mess)

Anyhow, I have stopped working on the diff for v.in.ascii for now as my
impression was that most people on this list would prefer to see the
table-only-creation option added to another module instead.

Cheers,

Benjamin

>>> Does anyone know what the restrictions on DBF field
>>> names are? Length?
>
>> 8 chars
>
> Add 2:
> "DBF column names are limited to 10 characters (DBF API definition)"
[1]

That's really cool, because this says it's 12:
http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_shapefile.html

(And I am pretty sure I saw 13 on some other page .. what a mess)

yeah well, the specification says field names are limited to 10 chars + a
null terminator.
  http://www.clicketyclick.dk/databases/xbase/format/dbf.html

there have been a number of variants over the years, so I wouldn't be
surprised if somewhere someone at sometime wrote in a 12 char field
length, but if that even exists I don't think it is very common or worth
worrying about.

Probably file a doc bug with GDAL; the OGR shapefile code limits it to
10,
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/browser/trunk/gdal/ogr/ogrsf_frmts/shape/dbfopen.c#L716

Anyhow, I have stopped working on the diff for v.in.ascii for now as my
impression was that most people on this list would prefer to see the
table-only-creation option added to another module instead.

note Markus has added a db.in.ogr module
(I don't think that includes v.in.ascii's automatic column scanning, but
that scanning code still needs a bit of work)

Hamish

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