Reading and Writing Files

Reading Spatial Data

geopandas can read almost any vector-based spatial data format including ESRI shapefile, GeoJSON files and more using the command:

geopandas.read_file()

which returns a GeoDataFrame object. (This is possible because geopandas makes use of the great fiona library, which in turn makes use of a massive open-source program called GDAL/OGR designed to facilitate spatial data transformations).

Any arguments passed to read_file() after the file name will be passed directly to fiona.open, which does the actual data importation. In general, read_file is pretty smart and should do what you want without extra arguments, but for more help, type:

import fiona; help(fiona.open)

Among other things, one can explicitly set the driver (shapefile, GeoJSON) with the driver keyword, or pick a single layer from a multi-layered file with the layer keyword.

Where supported in fiona, geopandas can also load resources directly from a web URL, for example for GeoJSON files from geojson.xyz:

url = "http://d2ad6b4ur7yvpq.cloudfront.net/naturalearth-3.3.0/ne_110m_land.geojson"
df = geopandas.read_file(url)

geopandas can also get data from a PostGIS database using the read_postgis() command.

Writing Spatial Data

GeoDataFrames can be exported to many different standard formats using the GeoDataFrame.to_file() method. For a full list of supported formats, type import fiona; fiona.supported_drivers.