Keep only one geometry type when clipping polygons to sqlite with ogr2ogr

Question

I have a regular grid of polygons and want to clip them using ogr2ogr. While using sqlite files as destination I stumbled over some wierd behavior:

When clipping polygons exactly at their borders, a mix of geometry types is created so that I end up with points, lines and polygons while I only would expect polygons. When using an ESRI Shapefile, I get errors, thus I add -skipfailures. However, eventually, the Shapefile will only contain one polygon. The figure at the bottom shows the example data.

So my Question is: Is there any possibility to define or select the output geometry type from the clipping? I stumbled over a similar post. Adding to this, would there be any solution, how to do this in one ogr2ogr statement?

I prepared a reproducible example:

#! /bin/bash
echo "ID, GM" > poly.csv
echo '1, "POLYGON((4249000 2863000, 4250000 2863000, 4250000 2862000, 4249000 2862000, 4249000 2863000))"' >> poly.csv
echo '2, "POLYGON((4250000 2863000, 4251000 2863000, 4251000 2862000, 4250000 2862000, 4250000 2863000))"' >> poly.csv
echo '3, "POLYGON((4250000 2862000, 4251000 2862000, 4251000 2861000, 4250000 2861000, 4250000 2862000))"' >> poly.csv
echo '4, "POLYGON((4249000 2862000, 4250000 2862000, 4250000 2861000, 4249000 2861000, 4249000 2862000))"' >> poly.csv

# vrt in order for reproducibility
echo '<OGRVRTDataSource>
    <OGRVRTLayer name="poly">
       <SrcDataSource>poly.csv</SrcDataSource>
      <GeometryType>wkbPolygon</GeometryType>
 <LayerSRS>PROJCS["ETRS89 / ETRS-LAEA",GEOGCS["ETRS89",DATUM["European_Terrestrial_Reference_System_1989",SPHEROID["GRS 1980",6378137,298.257222101,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7019"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","6258"]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],UNIT["degree",0.01745329251994328,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","4258"]],UNIT["metre",1,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9001"]],PROJECTION["Lambert_Azimuthal_Equal_Area"],PARAMETER["latitude_of_center",52],PARAMETER["longitude_of_center",10],PARAMETER["false_easting",4321000],PARAMETER["false_northing",3210000],AUTHORITY["EPSG","3035"],AXIS["X",EAST],AXIS["Y",NORTH]]</LayerSRS>
 <GeometryField encoding="WKT" field="GM"> </GeometryField>
     </OGRVRTLayer>
</OGRVRTDataSource>' > poly.vrt

# convert vrt to sqlite
ogr2ogr -f "SQLite" poly.sqlite poly.vrt

# clip twice
ogr2ogr -f "SQLite" -clipsrc 4250000 2860000 4252000 2862000 out.sqlite poly.sqlite
ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" -clipsrc 4250000 2860000 4252000 2862000 out.shp poly.sqlite -skipfailures
# check the result
ogrinfo out.sqlite -al 
ogrinfo out.shp -al 

Output:

# the sqlite
....
OGRFeature(poly):1
  id (String) = 1
  POINT (4250000 2862000)

OGRFeature(poly):2
  id (String) = 2
  LINESTRING (4251000 2862000,4250000 2862000)

OGRFeature(poly):3
  id (String) = 3
  POLYGON ((4250000 2862000,4251000 2862000,4251000 2861000,4250000 2861000,4250000 2862000))

OGRFeature(poly):4
  id (String) = 4
  LINESTRING (4250000 2862000,4250000 2861000)
....

# the shp
....
  POLYGON ((4250000 2862000,4251000 2862000,4251000 2861000,4250000 2861000,4250000 2862000))
....

Figure: visualization of the problem.
blue dashed line: exemplary clipping extent
red: location where the point is created
green: location where the lines are created

Answer 1

Ok, I found the solution myself: Just add the following flags-nlt POLYGON -dsco SPATIALITE=YES -skipfailures. Obviously the dataset creation option dsco SPATIALITE=YES prevents the driver to insert differing geometry types into the column. Hence, the desired / expected output is met. skipfailures must be added since, the driver will exit on an error.

ogr2ogr -f SQLite -nlt POLYGON -dsco SPATIALITE=YES -skipfailures -clipsrc 4250000 2860000 4252000 2862000 out.sqlite poly.sqlite 

Unfortunately, I did not yet find any source that would explicitly explain this specific behavior.