Shapefilepy fails to open a shapefile that has zero records. about pyshp

[karimbahgat]

Based on the error message this is not related to an empty shapefile. Rather, it is related to the code reaching the end of file (returning fewer than the needed 32 bytes) when reading the fields in the dbf file, which would make sense if there were no records after the header. But the error is because the lib believes there are more fields than there actually is. This could be because the calculation code is wrong, but this has not been a problem until now, and I have tested that reading empty shapefiles indeed works, even with zero fields. So more likely I suspect you might have had a file where the dbfheaderlength was misreported. Closing this for now, unless you have reason to believe this is a systematic error.

(It could also be a rare issue with the dbf deletion field not being present if that is at all possible, but that would require diving into the dbf spec).

[karimbahgat]

See below for the part where the number of fields is calculated. If there was an issue with the calculation then it would be the -33 part as I am not sure what that does.

numFields = (headerLength - 33) // 32