Select by attribute using fiona

Digging into Data: How to Pick Out Exactly What You Need with Fiona

Fiona. Ever heard of it? If you’re wrestling with geospatial data in Python, it’s a name you should know. Think of it as your friendly translator for all sorts of map files – Shapefiles, GeoJSON, you name it. It’s built on some serious tech called GDAL, but Fiona makes it all feel… well, Pythonic. Now, one thing you’ll often want to do is grab only the good bits – the features that match certain criteria. That’s where “select by attribute” comes in.

Okay, so Fiona doesn’t have a big, obvious “SELECT * WHERE…” button like you might find in a database. Bummer, right? But don’t sweat it! It’s still totally doable. You just have to get a little creative with Python. Basically, we’re going to walk through the data and pick out the pieces we want.

So, how do we actually do this? Let’s break it down:

First things first: Import Fiona. Obvious, I know, but gotta start somewhere!

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