Do 1KB Shapefiles with bigger .shp.xml contain any usable data?

Question

I received this folder from a county's GIS department. Am I right in telling them that there is nothing in it? They seem convinced that everything is included, but all I see is that there is Metadata associated with the Shapefile that isn't contained within the Shapefile itself. Am I doing something wrong or is the fault on their end?

Answer 1

In the OSGeo4W Shell, you can run

 ogrinfo -al -so Centerlines.shp

To get the Feature Count of a shapefile. If it is zero, there is nothing to display.

Answer 2

First, the 1KB is Windows Explorer rounding to a lower bound. If you use dir (or ls -l in OSGeo4W, you will see file sizes in bytes of less than 1024.

Second, this file can contain data. I created a new point shapefile and added exactly one feature. The only attribute columns are default ID columns. I did not create metadata, so there is no *.shp.xml file. However, all other files (SHP, DBF, SHX, etc.) are created. In Windows Explorer, they all appear to have a file size of 1KB. However, ls -l produces the following:

-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators     5 Jun  4 15:56 temp.cpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators    73 Jun  4 15:56 temp.dbf
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators   562 Jun  4 15:55 temp.prj
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators   148 Jun  4 15:56 temp.sbn
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators   116 Jun  4 15:56 temp.sbx
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators   128 Jun  4 15:56 temp.shp
-rw-r--r-- 1 CLASMRT Administrators   108 Jun  4 15:56 temp.shx

So, if there are a small number of features and few attributes, the file sizes would be very small. Note however, that if there are no features, the file sizes are still not zero bytes, so you cannot confirm that it is not empty based on file size.

If you load in ArcMap or QGIS, you should be able to open the attribute table. If there are no rows, there is no data. You can also use ogrinfo (if you have OSGeo4W installed). As given by AndreJ, the command is:

ogrinfo -al -so Centerlines.shp

But this shouldn't give you any more information than you get by opening the attribute table in QGIS or ArcGIS.

Answer 3

That looks fine to me. A shapefile consists of a bunch of files (despite the name) of which there must be a .shp, .dbf and .shx files. Often you will get a .prj, .sbn & .xml files to bu they are not necessary.

Answer 4

If you have a license for ArcGIS Advanced ,Could you export them to geodatabase and see if it shows up ? Worth to try and check..

Or you can run Check Geometry for any problems with the shapefile. Here is the information you can read about it. http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/data-management-toolbox/check-geometry.htm

Answer 5

The easiest way to check for data in a shapefile if you don't have GIS software handy is to open the shapefile's DBF file with Excel.

For example, I have created a shapefile and added a field to it, but created no features.

In the Excel Open dialogue you need to change the Type drop-down to dBase File

And the file open in Excel shows a couple of field names but no data (nothing in row 2 etc.)

If I then go and open the shapefile in ArcMap and add a few features (and still no attribution just to show the effect)

and reopen in Excel you can now see there are some rows showing in the DBF file.