Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

QGIS is a desktop geographic information system that facilitates data viewing, editing, and analysis. Paired with the most efficient scripting language—Python, we can write effective scripts that extend the core functionality of QGIS. Based on version QGIS 2.18, this book will teach you how to write Python code that works with spatial data to automate geoprocessing tasks in QGIS. It will cover topics such as querying and editing vector data and using raster data. You will also learn to create, edit, and optimize a vector layer for faster queries, reproject a vector layer, reduce the number of vertices in a vector layer without losing critical data, and convert a raster to a vector. Following this, you will work through recipes that will help you compose static maps, create heavily customized maps, and add specialized labels and annotations. As well as this, we’ll also share a few tips and tricks based on different aspects of QGIS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Counting raster bands


A raster might have one or more bands. Bands represent layers of information within a raster. Each band has the same number of columns and rows.

Getting ready

We will again use the SatImage raster available at https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/SatImage.zip.

Place this raster in your /qgis_data/rasters directory.

How to do it...

We will load the layer and then print the band count to the console. To do this, we need to perform the following steps:

  1. Start QGIS.

  2. From the Plugins menu, select Python Console.

  3. In the Python console, load the layer and ensure that it is valid:

            rasterLyr = QgsRasterLayer("/qgis_data/rasters/satimage.tif",
                                       "Sat Image") 
            rasterLyr.isValid() 
    
  4. Now, get the band count, which should be 3 in this case:

            rasterLyr.bandCount() 
    

How it works...

It is important to note that raster bands are not zero-based indexes. When you want to access the first band, you reference it as 1 instead of 0...