Select features by matching attributes of two shapefiles?

Question

I have one line shapefile with lot of road sections and a point shapefile, some of these points are outside my area of interest.

The files have one attribute in common and I would like to do selection, where I select only those points that have matching attribute value with the line shapefile.

Is this possible in some meaningful way?

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I believe that in this particular case I could do line buffers and use those to select the point in buffer area - but I was wondering if its possible to match the values "straight away" with each other.

Answer 1

With both layers loaded in your table of contents, go to the properties of your point layer. In the properties go to the Join tab and click the + button to add a new join, using the line layer as your target. If your line layer has a field you know is populated in all records, you can do a select from your point layer for the NOT NULL records in that field, eliminating the non-matching records.

This is an awkward work around. It would be better if QGIS had a "Keep only matching records" type join. Another, simpler work around would be to import your data into either a PostGIS or Spatialite database. Then you could do an INNER JOIN on the two tables, which would only return rows that have a match in both tables.