Geometries may also support 3- or 4- dimensional Z and M coordinates, for elevation and measure, respectively. This axis order is consistent for Geographic coordinate systems, where the order is similarly (longitude latitude). The 2D axis ordering of coordinate data assumes a Cartesian coordinate system, using the order (X Y) or (Easting Northing). This format should not be confused with the AutoCAD shape font source format, which shares the. A detailed description of the file format is given in the ESRI Shapefile Technical Description. Each of the variable-length records includes a record-header component and a record-contents component. The binary file consists of a single fixed-length header followed by one or more variable-length records. shx files have various fields with different endianness, so an implementer of the file formats must be very careful to respect the endianness of each field and treat it properly. shp file corresponds to the first record in the. dbf files, the shapes in each file correspond to each other in sequence (i.e., the first record in the. shp - shape format the feature geometry itself Legacy GIS software may expect that the filename prefix be limited to eight characters to conform to the DOS 8.3 filename convention, though modern software applications accept files with longer names. shp file, but alone is incomplete for distribution as the other supporting files are required.

The actual shapefile relates specifically to the. The three mandatory files have filename extensions. The term 'shapefile' is quite common, but the format consists of a collection of files with a common filename prefix, stored in the same directory.

These shapes, together with data attributes that are linked to each shape, create the representation of the geographic data. The shapefile format stores the data as primitive geometric shapes like points, lines, and polygons.

It is now possible to read and write geographical datasets using the shapefile format with a wide variety of software. The shapefile format was introduced with ArcView GIS version 2 in the early 1990s. This format lacks the capacity to store topological information.

The shapefile format is a digital vector storage format for storing geographic location and associated attribute information.

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