Misleading warning

[Nowosad]

In the last few weeks, I've came across this warning message when I've been writing data to .shp file - Value [SOME_VALUE] of field big_number of feature [SOME_VALUE] not successfully written. Possibly due to too larger number with respect to field width. However, a new file (and a new object) looks the same as the old one. Reproducible example below:

> nc = st_read(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"), quiet = TRUE)
> nc$big_number = seq(100000, 9900100000, 100000000)
> st_write(nc, 'nc2.shp')
Writing layer `nc2.shp` to data source `nc2.shp` using driver `ESRI Shapefile`
features:       100
fields:         15
geometry type:  Multi Polygon
There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)
> warnings()[1]
Warning message:
In CPL_write_ogr(obj, dsn, layer, driver, as.character(dataset_options),  ... :
  GDAL Message 1: Value 100100000 of field big_number of feature 1 not successfully written. Possibly due to too larger number with respect to field width
> nc2 = st_read('nc2.shp', quiet = TRUE)
> identical(nc$big_number, nc2$big_number)
[1] TRUE

[edzer]

The warning is emitted by gdal, not by sf; I could silence the warning generator before writing, but that would also suppress helpful warnings, maybe not such a good idea.

Does this also occur when you write to GPKG? (we live in post-shapefile era)

[Nowosad]

Nope, it works fine with GPKG.
Btw - I want to think that we live in a post-shapefile era, but probably it's still way ahead...

[edzer]

It's up to you.

[edzer]

rgdal::writeOGR gives the same warnings; there's little we can do in R to ease the pain caused by shapefiles.

[edzer]

This is a known problem of the GDAL shapefile driver, hence I close it here.