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I am trying to import a csv or dbf into qGIS so I can perform a join on a shapefile. However, qGIS is not detecting the first row as header names. I know I've done similar joins before and there's never been a problem detecting column headers. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

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please share the first few lines of your CSV – underdark♦ Feb 13 at 18:57
Perhaps special characters in the column name? – Brad Nesom Feb 14 at 3:16
I've tried saving the file as a .dbf in Open Office, but it too is not seeing the intended column names and instead creating a new row of column names. The data looks like this in Open Office: N1,C,20 N2,C,13 N3,C,4 N4,N,7,2 <linebreak> Country Continent OECD 2004.00 <linebreak> Brunei Darussalam Asia N 0.00 <linebreak> – James Conkling Feb 15 at 5:03
@JamesConkling you should 1. edit your original question with enhancing information rather than create a new comment. 2. check the answer that solved the issue an answer. – Brad Nesom Feb 15 at 15:41

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Turns out Open Office was adding the new row of column names (N1,C,20 | N2,C,13 | N3,C,4 | N4,N,7,2 etc.) because some of the existing column names were only numbers. The problem persisted even after I reformatted the column row as text. However, after adding text to those column names, (e.g. changing 2004 to year_2004) Open Office stopped automatically inserting the new column names.

Problem solved--don't use only numeric characters as field names.

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up vote 0 down vote

I've gotten around this problem by opening the file in Open Office and saving the file as a .dbf

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I've tried saving the file as a .dbf in Open Office, but it too is not seeing the intended column names and instead creating a new row of column names. The data looks like this in Open Office: – James Conkling Feb 15 at 4:52
up vote 0 down vote

CSV should probably be in the format of... 

Myidfield, country, contintent, OECD, YEAR
1,durusallem, Asia, N, 00000.00

The char fields I think will default to 255, the number field will take the size and decimal from the first value in the column.

csv being "comma separated values".
As per my other comment you should certainly stay away from a "." In the field name.

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