Check geometry type of shapefile with GeoPandas

Question

Using GeoPandas, how can I check the geometry type of a shapefile (i.e. Point, LineString, Polygon etc).

I can use the following to check the geometry type of each feature but this is unnecessary, I would just like to know if the shapefile is a LineString or not:

import geopandas as gpd
df = gpd.read_file('path/to/shapefile')
df.geom_type

0      LineString
1      LineString
2      LineString
3      LineString
4      LineString
             ...
423    LineString
424    LineString
425    LineString

Length: 426, dtype: object

Answer 1

Fiona.open seems to be fast (geopandas depend on fiona):

import fiona, geopandas, time

#A line shapefile, total size 118 MB
shape = r"/home/bera/Desktop/GIStest/ml_riks.shp"

#Fiona open
start = time.process_time()
c = fiona.open(shape)
if c.schema["geometry"]=='LineString':
    print("Line")
print(time.process_time()-start)
#Line
#0.0016448840000009568

#Geopandas checking geometry type of first feature
start = time.process_time()
df = geopandas.read_file(shape)
if df.iloc[0].geometry.type=='LineString':
    print("Line 2")
print(time.process_time()-start)
#Line 2
#5.306254288999995

#Geopandas checking if all features are linestrings
start = time.process_time()
df = geopandas.read_file(shape)
if df.geom_type.str.contains("LineString").all():
    print("Line 3")
print(time.process_time()-start)
#Line 3
#5.525147246000017

Answer 2

If you are using GeoPandas and are going to load the shapefile anyway, you can check immediately after reading it by doing df.geom_type.unique(). It's good to check in case there are mix of LineString and MultiLineString (or Polygon/MultiPolygon or Point/MultiPoint).

Answer 3

Since geopandas 1.0 a new, faster, engine became the default to read/write files: pyogrio.

It also has a function to get basic information about a file without reading all data: pyogrio.read_info.

The information returned is the following (note the "geometry_type" field):

{
    "layer_name": "<layer name>",
    "crs": "<crs>",
    "fields": <ndarray of field names>,
    "dtypes": <ndarray of field dtypes>,
    "encoding": "<encoding>",
    "fid_column": "<fid column name or "">",
    "geometry_name": "<geometry column name or "">",
    "geometry_type": "<geometry type>",
    "features": <feature count or -1>,
    "total_bounds": <tuple with total bounds or None>,
    "driver": "<driver>",
    "capabilities": "<dict of driver capabilities>"
    "dataset_metadata": "<dict of dataset metadata or None>"
}

Sample code:

import pyogrio

geometry_type = pyogrio.read_info("file.shp")["geometry_type"]