GeoPandas Export Error – How to Fix ValueError for Invalid Shapely Geometry Field Type

exportgeopandaspythonshapefile

I try to export an shp from Python using geopandas with this:

#Create a output path for the data
out = r"C:\Users\hhh\Desktop\ge.shp"

## Write those rows into a new Shapefile 
df.to_file(out)

and I get this error:

ValueError: Invalid field type <class 'shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon'>

The type of the df is geopandas.geodataframe.GeoDataFrame and I have done some geoprocessing which may be causing errors at the output. Also, it gives an output but when I open it, it shows nothing and the attribute table is also empty.

I checked this with another case by taking a subset from an shp read in python:

out = r"C:\Users\hhh\Desktop\hid.shp"

selection = data[0:50]

selection.to_file(out)

and it worked.

What can be causing this problem in the first case?

Best Answer

Shapefiles have some limitations, including:

  • They cannot have multiple columns with geometry data
  • The geometries cannot contains multiple types (so eg both Points and LineStrings)

In both cases you will get errors when trying to write a GeoDataFrame to a shapefile.

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