topic Re: Creating Layers from files in memory in Python Questions

Creating Layers from files in memory

mattkramer — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 16:37:00 GMT

Hello,

I was wondering if it was possible to create an "in_memory" or a "memory" feature layer from a downloaded zipped shapefile, without saving that zip file to the disk. I am hoping to download multiple zip files from an ftp site and compile them into one final deliverable with only the final shapefile or feature class being written to disk.

Thanks,

Re: Creating Layers from files in memory

BlakeTerhune — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 19:10:27 GMT

Could you use tempfile.mkdtemp() to make a temporary directory to unzip the shapefile and then clean it up when finished?

Re: Creating Layers from files in memory

Luke_Pinner — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 02:22:02 GMT

If you're using ArcGIS Pro 2.8+ you could install geopandas (in a cloned env). You can read from a zipfile URL directly into a geodataframe, append more geodataframes, and then write out to file

import geopandas as gpd a_url = 'https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/raw/master/tests/data/coutwildrnp.zip' gdf = gpd.read_file(a_url) another_url = 'https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/raw/master/tests/data/coutwildrnp.zip' gdf.append(gpd.read_file(another_url)) gdf.to_file('test.shp')

Re: Creating Layers from files in memory

mattkramer — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 15:46:03 GMT

I was able to get this to work, I ended up using:

with TemporaryDirectory() as TempDownloadLocation: Download files using TempDownloadLocation

This format so once the code within the "with" statement was done, the temporary folder gets cleaned up automatically.

Thank you!

Re: Creating Layers from files in memory

mattkramer — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 15:47:55 GMT

Since I will be packaging this into a tool for other users to use, I decided to not go this route. I don't think I can get some non programming folk to install geopandas. Thank you though!