Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook

Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Joining a shapefile attribute table to a CSV file


Joining attribute tables to other database tables allows you to use a spatial dataset in order to reference a dataset without any geometry, using a common key between the data tables. A very common use case for this is to join a vector dataset of census attributes to a more detailed census attribute dataset. The use case we will demonstrate here links a US census track file to a detailed CSV file that contains more in-depth information.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need a census tract shapefile and a CSV file containing the appropriate census data for the shapefile. You can download the sample data set from https://geospatialpython.googlecode.com/svn/census.zip.

Extract this data to a directory named /qgis_data/census.

How to do it...

The join operation is quite involved. We'll perform this operation and save the layer as a new shapefile with the joined attributes. Then we'll load the new layer and compare the field count to the original...