Recently I was trying to build a quick geo lookup service in python, which could be used like an “info tool” in QGIS. This task is trivial in almost all geospatial databases, however I wasn’t able to find much online around querying a shape file.

In this post I will demonstrate a simple python code to query a shape file which contains world countries. The file can be downloaded from here.

Here is the code

You will need python-gdal bindings. sudo apt-get install python-gdal

ogr.UseExceptions()
from pprint import pprint

 

path = "TM\_WORLD\_BORDERS\_SIMPL-0.3.shp"
drv = ogr.GetDriverByName("ESRI Shapefile")
ds = drv.Open(path, 0) 

 

result = ds.ExecuteSQL("select name from 'TM\_WORLD\_BORDERS\_SIMPL-0.3' where ST\_Intersects('TM\_WORLD\_BORDERS\_SIMPL-0.3'.geometry,makePoint(-0.2225382,51.5253007) )",dialect="SQLITE")

c = result.GetFeatureCount()
for i in range(c):
    print result.GetFeature(i).GetField(0)
 

ds.ReleaseResultSet(result)

Hope this helps.