ogr2ogr UNIX x Windows

GDAL with its ogr2ogr, ogrinfo and many more is one of the best open source tools to do anything to your spatial data. It is a command line tool, which sort of determines it to be used with UNIX systems, but you might bump into a Windows guy trying to use it as well once in a while.

Be careful, it behaves differently on different OS. Let’s say you do something like this on UNIX:

ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "attribute IN ('value1', 'value2')" output.json input.json

What you might get is a big nothing. Executed on Windows it gives you the result you’ve expected. Aargh, what is that supposed to mean?

Well, that’s the ogr2ogr’s way to tell you: Hello there, you need to switch single quotes for double quotes and vice versa, you dumb! I don’t know why and I find it really annoying. Just in case you get stuck with ogr2ogr (or probably any other command line tool), try this.