Sample Shapefile
A downloadable sample Esri Shapefile — zipped .shp, .shx, .dbf, and .prj members — containing 15 real US landmark point features with names, descriptions, and elevations. Use it to test GIS imports, DBF parsing, and shapefile converters.
sample-locations-shapefile.zip
Data Preview
| 1 | name | desc | elevation | latitude | longitude |
| 2 | Mount Rainier | Glaciated stratovolcano in Washington | 4392 | 46.85230000000001 | -121.7603 |
| 3 | Half Dome | Granite dome above Yosemite Valley | 2694 | 37.7459 | -119.53320000000001 |
| 4 | Grand Canyon South Rim | Overlook near Grand Canyon Village | 2093 | 36.0544 | -112.1401 |
| 5 | Old Faithful | Predictable geyser in Yellowstone | 2240 | 44.4605 | -110.8281 |
| 6 | Denali | Highest peak in North America | 6190 | 63.0692 | -151.007 |
| 7 | Angels Landing | Ridge viewpoint in Zion Canyon | 1765 | 37.269 | -112.9469 |
| 8 | Longs Peak | Fourteener in Rocky Mountain National Park | 4346 | 40.2549 | -105.616 |
| 9 | Mauna Kea | Dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii | 4207 | 19.8206 | -155.4681 |
| 10 | Crater Lake | Deepest lake in the United States | 1883 | 42.9446 | -122.10900000000001 |
| 11 | Mount Whitney | Highest summit in the contiguous United States | 4421 | 36.5785 | -118.29230000000001 |
| 12 | Badwater Basin | Lowest point in North America, Death Valley | -86 | 36.246100000000006 | -116.81720000000001 |
| 13 | Great Sand Dunes | Tallest dunes in North America | 2590 | 37.7916 | -105.5943 |
| 14 | Cadillac Mountain | Granite summit in Acadia National Park | 466 | 44.3528 | -68.2247 |
| 15 | Mount Mitchell | Highest peak east of the Mississippi | 2037 | 35.7648 | -82.2652 |
| 16 | Guadalupe Peak | Highest point in Texas | 2667 | 31.8914 | -104.8607 |
Schema
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| name | string | Landmark name, stored as a character field in the .dbf attribute table |
| desc | string | One-line description of the landmark; named desc because DBF field names are capped at 10 characters |
| elevation | number | Elevation in meters, stored as a numeric DBF field; negative for Badwater Basin |
| latitude | number | WGS84 latitude in decimal degrees, from the point geometry in the .shp member |
| longitude | number | WGS84 longitude in decimal degrees, from the point geometry in the .shp member |
About the Shapefile Format
The Esri Shapefile is the longtime workhorse of GIS data exchange, dating to the early 1990s — and it is famously not a single file. A working shapefile is a set of sibling files sharing one basename, which is why this sample downloads as a zip containing four members:
sample-locations.shp— the geometry: 15 point features in a fixed binary layoutsample-locations.shx— a positional index so readers can seek to record n without scanning the .shpsample-locations.dbf— a dBase III table with one attribute row per shape:name,desc, andelevationsample-locations.prj— the coordinate reference system (WGS84) as well-known text; without it, coordinates are just unlabeled numbers
The format’s most notorious quirk shows up in this sample’s schema: DBF field names are limited to 10 characters, so the description column ships as desc — “description” simply does not fit and would be truncated by any writer. Other classic limits (2 GB file size, no null geometry distinction, single geometry type per file) do not bite at this scale, but the naming cap does. Note the .shp stores no elevation here; elevation travels as a plain DBF attribute.
How to open it
- QGIS / ArcGIS — point either at the zip or the extracted
.shp; the siblings are picked up automatically - geopandas —
geopandas.read_file("sample-locations-shapefile.zip")reads the archive directly - ogrinfo / ogr2ogr (GDAL) —
ogr2ogr -f CSV out.csv sample-locations.shpfor a quick dump
Things to test with it
Badwater Basin’s elevation is −86 m, checking signed numeric DBF fields. If converted coordinates show trailing digits like 46.85230000000001, that is ordinary floating-point noise from reprojection passes, not corruption. The same 15 locations ship as GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, and GPX for comparison, and the Shapefile to CSV converter flattens this archive into rows without leaving your browser.