The problem I am face with is that I have all my data as shapefiles but my organization works with only 1 ArcGIS license. Migrating to QGIS to prominent amount of work, I need to convert my ArcGIS .style file to the .sld format of QGIS, to ensure uniformity of data capture and maps.
I am working with Python for this, Could anyone give me any suggestions?
As stated in this Esri's blog post:
The style files that are installed with ArcMap are actually Microsoft Access databases, the file extension was changed from .mdb to .style.
The blog post also describes a few useful things you can do to edit style files using Microsoft Access.
Please refer to this SO answer on How to deal with mdb access files with python.
Reading style in Python and export it to SLD format sounds like pretty extensive piece of work. There is already solution for that as part of Arc2Earth - more info here:
Converting ArcGIS layer style to Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) file?
There are also answers with few other solutions. If you really want to program it, I would consider to program it as plugin for QGIS - I am sure there are a lot of people who would like to have this feature in QGIS - including myself.
