[GIS] Why does QGIS not detect the CSV/DBF column headers

attribute-joinscsvqgis

I am trying to import a CSV or DBF into QGIS so I can perform a join on a shapefile. However, QGIS is not detecting the first row as header names. I know I've done similar joins before and there's never been a problem detecting column headers.

Best Answer

Turns out Open Office was adding the new row of column names (N1,C,20 | N2,C,13 | N3,C,4 | N4,N,7,2 etc.) because some of the existing column names were only numbers. The problem persisted even after I reformatted the column row as text. However, after adding text to those column names, (e.g. changing 2004 to year_2004) Open Office stopped automatically inserting the new column names.

Problem solved--don't use only numeric characters as field names.

Related Solutions

[GIS] Keep the same field headers after joining a table to a shapefile in QGIS

No, you cannot keep the original names. The problem is that DBF files and therefore Shapefile attribute tables have a limit of 10 characters for the column names.

When you join two layers, QGIS constructs new attribute names by combining layer and attribute names of the joined layer. To ensure unique column names, QGIS further adds a running number to the end of the name.

You'll have to rename the columns in the resulting file manually. The Table Manager plugin allows easy renaming.

[GIS] Using wildcards for column headers in QGIS Field Calculator

With the introduction of the Function Editor back in QGIS 2.8, it is possible to iterate through the field names and perform some sort of analysis:

from qgis.core import *
from qgis.gui import *

@qgsfunction(args='auto', group='Custom')
def fields(feature, parent):
    layer = qgis.utils.iface.activeLayer()
    field_names = [field.name() for field in layer.fields()]
    for name in field_names:
        if "some_name" in name:
            # Do something

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] Keep the same field headers after joining a table to a shapefile in QGIS

[GIS] Using wildcards for column headers in QGIS Field Calculator

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