DBF

DBF is the dBase database format. It's best known as the attribute-table half of a Shapefile, but Mapshaper can also import a .dbf on its own as a tabular layer with no geometry. CSV is generally preferred as an exchange format for tabular data.

File extension: .dbf · Read: ✓ · Write: ✓ · Geometry: none

CLI examples

mapshaper provinces.dbf -info
mapshaper provinces.dbf -filter '"BC,AB,SK".indexOf(prov) > -1' -o subset.csv
mapshaper data.csv -o data.dbf

Format-specific input options

• encoding= — text encoding. If omitted, Mapshaper auto-detects, falling back to a .cpg sidecar file if present. Run mapshaper -encodings for the list of supported encodings.

Format-specific output options

• encoding= — output text encoding. Default UTF-8 (with a matching .cpg sidecar).
• field-order=ascending — sort columns alphabetically.

Practical notes

• DBF holds tabular data only — no geometry.
• DBF files do not declare their text encoding internally. Mapshaper auto-detects against UTF-8, Windows-1252 and a few other common encodings. See the Shapefile encoding notes for the full picture.
• Field names are limited to 10 ASCII characters. Longer names are truncated on write; duplicate truncated names are disambiguated with numeric suffixes.
• Field values are limited to 254 characters; longer strings will have been truncated when the file was written.

External resources

• Wikipedia: .dbf — useful overview of the format's history and dialects.
• Xbase File Format Description — Erik Bachmann's reference for the dBase / xBase family. The standard external citation for byte-level DBF details.