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

Using the __geo_interface__ protocol


The __geo_interface__ is a newer protocol, created by Sean Gillies and targeted mainly at Python, to provide a string representation of geographical data following Python's built-ins protocol. The string representation for geographical data is basically GeoJSON. You can read more about this protocol here:

https://gist.github.com/sgillies/2217756

Two developers, Nathan Woodrow and Martin Laloux, refined a version of this protocol for QGIS Python data objects. This recipe borrows from their examples to provide a code snippet, which you can put at the beginning of your Python scripts to retrofit QGIS feature and geometry objects with a __geo_interface__ method.

Getting ready

This recipe requires no preparation.

How to do it...

We will create two functions: one for features and one for geometry. We'll then use Python's dynamic capability to patch the QGIS objects with a __geo_interface__ built-in method.

  1. First, we'll need the Python json module:

            import...