When I try to open streets.ship file from the exercise data file downloaded for working in the Quantum GIS Training Manual, I get an error message: Invalid Data Source C:/Users/new user/Documents/streets.ship is not a valid or recognized data source. What am I doing wrong?
[GIS] Opening .shp file under Add Vector Layer
qgisshapefile
Related Solutions
Your VRT is a vector dataset. gdal_translate is used to convert between raster formats not from vector to raster.
Instead, you can use:
ogr2ogrto output a shapefile or other vector format,- QGIS Processing toolbox | GDAL | Vector Conversion | Convert format
gdal_rasterizeto burn the points to a tiff, or- QGIS Processing toolbox | GDAL | Vector Conversion | Rasterize
gdal_gridto interpolate the points to a surface raster (I noticed some elevation fields in your VRT).- QGIS Processing toolbox | GDAL | Raster Analysis | Grid (*)
If the underlying CSV file is meant to be a raster dataset in XYZ format, gdal/QGIS should be able to read it directly as a raster if you drop the additional fields and just keep the "pnt_lon", "pnt_lat" and "pnt_height" (OR "pnt_demheight" but not both), sorted by lat then by lon. You could then use gdal_translate xyz.csv out.tif
GDAL supports reading and writing ASCII gridded XYZ raster datasets (i.e. ungridded XYZ, LIDAR XYZ etc. must be opened by other means. See the documentation of the gdal_grid utility).
Those datasets are ASCII files with (at least) 3 columns, each line containing the X and Y coordinates of the center of the cell and the value of the cell.
The spacing between each cell must be constant and no missing value is supported. Cells with same Y coordinates must be placed on consecutive lines. For a same Y coordinate value, the lines in the dataset must be organized by increasing X values. The value of the Y coordinate can increase or decrease however. The supported column separators are space, comma, semicolon and tabulations.
The driver tries to autodetect an header line and will look for 'x', 'lon' or 'east' names to detect the index of the X column, 'y', 'lat' or 'north' for the Y column and 'z', 'alt' or 'height' for the Z column. If no header is present or one of the column could not be identified in the header, the X, Y and Z columns (in that order) are assumed to be the first 3 columns of each line.
The file you shared has 200 field, and there must be some export issue from QGIS.
Workaround
Export from QGIS to Mapinfo's TAB only selecting some fields.
I tried with the following ones using the shp you provided:
The generated .tab file imports flawlessly:
My guess is that some field names have non-ascii characters: if you need more/all fields, you might need to hunt down which ones cause the problem, and rename it before exporting.
Best Answer
A shapefile consists of (at least) three files. In your case streets.shp, streets.dbf and streets.shx. These files should al reside in the same folder. If one of them is missing, the error message "streets.shp is not a valid or recognized data source" will appear.