m.in.e00

NAME

m.in.e00 - Read an ESRI e00 file
(GRASS Vector/Raster/Sites Data Import Program)

SYNOPSIS

m.in.e00
m.in.e00 [-idts] input=name [mapset=name] [action=what to do] [verbose=debug level] [logfile=name] [list=name,name,name...]

DESCRIPTION

The m.in.e00 program is designed to import ESRI Arc/Info e00 ascii archives. The input file may be a compressed e00 file : m.in.e00 will automatically recognize the format.

The module not only can analyse the content of an Arc/Info file, but try to create the objects described (geometry and attributes).

m.in.e00 will be run non-interactively if the user specifies program arguments on the command line, using the form:

m.in.e00 [-idts] input=name [mapset=name] [action=what to do] [verbose=debug level] [logfile=name] [list=list]

Alternately, the user can simply type:

m.in.e00

on the command line without program arguments. In this case, the user will be prompted for parameter values using the standard GRASS user interface described in the manual entry for parser.

FEATURES

m.in.e00 attemps to retrieve all information in an Arc/Info export file (.e00): points, line, polygon, and grid coverage. The attribute number of each "vector" object (points, line, and polygon) is the Arc/Info coverage-ID (and not the coverage-#). Both single and double precision are supported.

Unless otherwise directed with the list= parameter m.in.e00 may try to import all of the items in the INFO table of point and polygon attributes. For large e00 files this can prohibitively time-consuming and place unreasonable demands on computer memory.

GRASS files created have the name extracted from the first line of the e00 file, i.e. the name of the coverage. The file is read from the current directory unless specified differently.

The following rules are used : A line vector file is created when there is a non-empty ARC section, and neither PAL (Polygon Attribute Label) section, neither PAT (Point/Polygon Attribute Table) table in INFO section. Otherwise a polygon vector file is created, excepted when the ARC section is empty or doesn't exist, in which case a site file is created.

Dig_cats files are created if the PAT or AAT (Arc Attribute Table) tables have more attributes than the standard one. If there is one extra attribute, the dig_cats file has the name of the vector (dig) file created. If there is more than one extra attribute, the dig_cats files have names of the form cover_name.attribute_name. If you want to use one of them, you must rename it so it matches the name of the vector file. Doing this, the vector modules will use it for the raster file created.

To "activate" a category label file for the vector map "cover_name", change to:


    cd $LOCATION/dig_cats/
    ls cover_name.*
    cp cover_name.attribute_name cover_name
    cd $HOME

If you want to use another table entry, you have to run above procedure accordingly with cover_name.other_attribute_name.

When importing raster file ("GRID"), cats files are created the same way in $LOCATION/cats. Note that an empty cat file is automaticaly put in this directory when a raster file is created, so m.in.e00 allways use the cover_name.attribute_name form for raster category files.

OPTIONS

m.in.e00 requires the user to enter the following information:

Flags:

-i: Use the "feature-ID" of the arc info objects to link geometry and attribute's tables. The default is to use the "feature-#" field (which is an internal link, but you should not rely on it for linking Arc/Info objects to an external database.
-d: Use a database instead of as many dig_cats files as you have attributes in the INFO tables (not yet operational).
-t: Put all attributes in one category file, separated by tabs (not yet operational).
-s: Automatically run "v.support" on newly created vector file.

Parameters:

mapset=name

For creating a new mapset for the data imported. This may be useful, since we cannot create a projection info file and a default window in an existing mapset. When a file is imported in the current mapset, you should take care that they are in the same projection. Unfortunately, you may run in trouble after that when using g.region (Cf BUGS).

action=what to do

Five options: analyse, raster, lines, vector and all. By default, all is used and everything (grid, points, lines, polygons) is imported. Analyze produces no files, but only a log output (level 5) on stderr, and is useful to see whether the e00 file is clean or not. Raster imports only grid section. Lines imports only the geometry (no label are attached to the lines or polygons) of a point/line/polygon coverage. Vector imports a point/line/polygon coverage with their attributes.

verbose=debug level

Number between 0 (no trace of what's happening) and 9 (very verbose log).

logfile=name

Name of file where log info will be written. By default log info are directed to stderr.

list=name,name,name...

A list of INFO item names (attributes) to extract from the INFO tables. The list is not case-sensitive, but must be comma-delimited without intervening spaces. If the list is omitted then m.in.e00 will try to extract all of the items in the INFO tables. The names of items in the INFO table can be listed by running :

m.in.e00 input=< filename> action=analyse verbose=7

This command will also produce a lot of other information, so it may be best to direct the output to a file.

BUGS AND CAVEAT

If the E00 file contains areas, it is recommended to set the map scale (in v.digit) to some big value (1:1), and run v.support again. Otherwise map threshold is too big, and v.support may fail even on clean data.

You must know what to do with all the dig_cats file generated when importing a vector coverage.

The program may crash when unexpexted data (mainly in INFO section) are found, or when the input file is corrupted.

There is no support for projection. Using verbose=1 lets you see the parameters of the e00 file, but you must create the DEFAULT_WIND and the PROJ file yourself. Using verbose=4 (at least), the logfile will show the content of the projection info of the e00 file imported.

New mapset are always created with proj=0 zone=99. If the default proj and zone are not the same, g.region complains and d.vect or d.rast refuse to display your data. The only thing to do is to import in the current mapset.

REFERENCES

E00 format

AUTHOR

Michel J. Wurtz, DIG/cemagref
mw@teledetection.fr

Last changed: $Date: 2002/07/19 20:40:59 $