A python script to detect encoding and SRID of a shapefile GUESSING its best

readshp.py

from chardet.universaldetector import UniversalDetector
import os.path
import sys
import dbfUtils
import sys
from osgeo import osr
from urllib import urlencode
from urllib2 import urlopen
import json

shp_file = sys.argv[1]

dbf_file = shp_file[0:-4] + '.dbf'
prj_file = shp_file[0:-4] + '.prj'


#Try detecting the SRID, by default we set to 4326 and hope the best
srid=4326
if os.path.isfile(prj_file):
    prj_filef = open(prj_file, 'r')
    prj_txt = prj_filef.read()
    prj_filef.close()
    srs = osr.SpatialReference()
    srs.ImportFromESRI([prj_txt])
    srs.AutoIdentifyEPSG()
    code = srs.GetAuthorityCode(None)
    if code:
        srid= code
    else:
        #Ok, no luck, lets try with the OpenGeo service
        query = urlencode({
            'exact' : True,
            'error' : True,
            'mode' : 'wkt',
            'terms' : prj_txt})
        webres = urlopen('http://prj2epsg.org/search.json', query)
        jres = json.loads(webres.read())
        if jres['codes']:
            srid = int(jres['codes'][0]['code'])

#Try to detect the encoding
dbf = open(dbf_file, 'rb')
db = dbfUtils.dbfreader(dbf)

detector = UniversalDetector()
for row in db:
    detector.feed(str(row))
    if detector.done: break
detector.close()
dbf.close()


encoding = detector.result["encoding"]
if encoding=="ascii":
    encoding="LATIN1"


print "shp2pgsql -s %s -k -i -I -W %s %s.shp public.importing_table" %(srid,encoding,shp_file)