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The maximum field length that I can specify is 255 and because of that I'm having problems with the input attributes, which have a size greater than 255.

What alternatives are there for having longer field lengths?

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Cathrin, accepting any good answers to your previous questions helps us know what has worked and what has not. This will encourage people to answer your questions in the future. Please take a moment to review your other questions and, if you can, accept answers to some of them. – whuber♦ Jun 26 '12 at 14:51

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

That's one of the many limitations of the Shapefile format, imposed by the DBF format.

Consider using PostGIS to store your data and attributes, where the lengths of text fields are virtually unlimited.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you have Microsoft Access, you can create a Memo field in a table for your data requiring > 255 characters, populate the table, and then in QGIS join your Shapefile to the mdb table.

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