Limitations and Known Issues

Support for null values

Some data sources support NULL or otherwise unset field values. These cannot be properly stored into the ndarray for certain types. If NULL or unset values are encountered, the following occurs:

  • If the field is a string type, NULL values are represented as None

  • If the field is a boolean or an integer type (np.int32, np.int64), the field data are re-cast to np.float64 values, and NULL values are represented as np.nan

  • If the field is a date or datetime type, the field is set as np.datetime64(‘NaT’)

Note: detection of NULL or otherwise unset field values is limited to the subset of records that are read from the data layer, which means that reading different subsets of records may yield different data types for the same columns. You can use read_info() to determine the original data types of each column.

No support for measured geometries

Measured geometry types are not supported for reading or writing. These are not supported by the GEOS library and cannot be converted to geometry objects in GeoDataFrames.

These are automatically downgraded to their 3D (x,y,z) equivalent and a warning is raised.

To ignore this warning:

>>> import warnings
>>> warnings.filterwarnings("ignore", message=".*Measured \(M\) geometry types are not supported.*")

No support for curvilinear, triangle, TIN, and surface geometries

Pyogrio does not support curvilinear, triangle, TIN, and surface geometries. These are automatically converted to their linear approximation when reading geometries from the data layer.

Character encoding

Pyogrio supports reading / writing data layers with a defined encoding. Where possible and the encoding option is not specified, GDAL will attempt to automatically decode from the native encoding to UTF-8, and pyogrio will report that the encoding is UTF-8 in that case instead of the native encoding. For ESRI Shapefiles, GDAL will use the associated .cpg file or a code page specified in the .dbf file to infer the native encoding, but may incorrectly assume the native encoding is ISO-8859-1, leading to miscoding errors. Most other drivers are assumed to be in UTF-8, but it is possible (in theory) to specify the encoding parameter manually to force conversions to use the specified encoding value.

Field names and values are read into Python UTF-8 strings.

No validation of geometry or field types

Pyogrio does not currently validate attribute values or geometry types before attempting to write to the output file. Invalid types may crash during writing with obscure error messages.

Support for OpenStreetMap (OSM) data

OpenStreetMap data do not natively support calculating the feature count by data layer due to the internal data structures. To get around this, Pyogrio iterates over all features first to calculate the feature count that is used to allocate arrays that contain the geometries and attributes read from the data layer, and then iterates over all feature again to populate those arrays. Further, data within the file are not structured at the top level to support fast reading by layer, which means that reading data by layer may need to read all records within the data source, not just those belonging to a particular layer. This is inefficient and slow, and is exacerbated when attemping to read from remotely-hosted data sources rather than local files.

You may also be instructed by GDAL to enable interleaved reading mode via an error message when you try to read a large file without it, which you can do in one of two ways:

  1. Set config option used for all operations

from pyogrio import set_gdal_config_options

set_gdal_config_options({"OGR_INTERLEAVED_READING": True})

  1. Set dataset open option


from pyogrio import read_dataframe

df = read_dataframe(path, INTERLEAVED_READING=True)

We recommend the following to sidestep performance issues:

  • download remote OSM data sources to local files before attempting to read

  • the use_arrow=True option may speed up reading from OSM files

  • if possible, use a different tool such as ogr2ogr to translate the OSM data source into a more performant format for reading by layer, such as GPKG

Incorrect results when using a spatial filter and Arrow interface

Due to a bug in GDAL, when using the Arrow interface (e.g., via use_arrow on read_dataframe) certain drivers (e.g., GPKG, FlatGeobuf, Arrow, Parquet) returned features whose bounding boxes intersected the bounding box specified by bbox or mask geometry instead of those whose geometry intersected the bbox or mask.

A fix is expected in GDAL 3.8.0.