I am interested in gleaning information from an ESRI .shp file.
Specifically the .shp file of a polyline feature class.
When I open the .dbf of a feature class, I get what I would expect: a table that can open in excel and contains the information from the feature class' table.
However, when I try to open a .shp file in any program (excel, textpad, etc...) all I get is a bunch of gibberish and unusual ASCII characters.
I would like to use Python (2.x) to interpret this file and get information out of it (in this case the vertices of the polyline).
I do not want to use any modules or non built-in tools, as I am genuinely interested in how this process would work and I don't want any dependencies.
Thank you for any hints or points in the right direction you can give!
Your question, basically, is "I have a file full of data stored in an arbitrary binary format. How can I use python to read such a file?"
The answer is, this link contains a description of the format of the file. Write a dissector based on the technical specification.