When string values are decoded, null values are added to the end of the string. about shapefile

[mbostock]

I intend to investigate.

[mbostock]

According to the dBASE documentation, character and numeric fields are “padded with blanks to the width of the field”. My interpretation of a “blank” is 0x20 (SPACE), not 0x0 (NULL). I don’t have any examples of dBASE files that have NULL characters in them, so I can’t reproduce this problem.

If dBASE files can contain NULL-terminated strings, rather than SPACE-padded ones, then probably the right thing to do is to find the index of the first NULL character and slice the string at that point, instead of dropping NULL characters wherever they occur. But as I don’t have any .dbf files formatted this way, I can only speculate. If you can provide me with some test files to reproduce this behavior, I would be happy to reopen this issue and investigate.