# Shapes from ESRI shape files

Pycoast supports plotting of polygons and polylines from ESRI shapefiles, currently only in lonlat coordinates format. In the following example we use `add_shapefile_shapes` method to plot all line shapes found in the file Metareas.shp. We then use the `add_shapefile_shape` (notice the singular) to plot only the 3rd and 4th shape_id within the file BR_Regioes.shp.

    >>> from pycoast import ContourWriterAGG
    >>> img = Image.new('RGB', (600, 600))
    >>> proj4_string = '+proj=merc +lon_0=-60 +lat_ts=-30.0 +a=6371228.0 +units=m'
    >>> area_extent = (-2000000.0, -5000000.0, 5000000.0, 2000000.0)
    >>> area_def = (proj4_string, area_extent)
    >>> cw = ContourWriterAGG(gshhs_root_dir)
    ...
    >>> cw.add_coastlines(img, area_def, resolution='l', level=4)
    >>> cw.add_shapefile_shapes(img, area_def,
                                'test/test_data/shapes/Metareas.shp',
                                outline='red',width=2)
    >>> cw.add_shapefile_shape(img, area_def,
                               'test/test_data/shapes/divisao_politica/BR_Regioes.shp',
                               3, outline='blue')
    >>> cw.add_shapefile_shape(img, area_def,
                               'test/test_data/shapes/divisao_politica/BR_Regioes.shp',
                               4, outline='blue', fill='green')

## Reproject unsupported shapefiles

If your shapefile is not in lonlat coordinates, then you can re-project your shape file using `ogr2ogr` (part of GDAL tools), e.g.

    $ ogr2ogr original.shp  lonlat.shp  -t_srs "+proj=latlong"

This should work if you have all the extra meta-files original.* included with your original.shp. Please refer to the OGR documentation for more information.

## Complex shape drawing

To further customize how shapes are drawn the `add_shapes()` can be used. This is the low-level version of the `add_shapefile_shape` method described above. This method takes an iterable of shape objects to draw with optional drawing parameters. In combination with python generators this can provide a high performance method for drawing multiple shapes with per-shape customization. In the below example a custom generator function is defined to open a shapefile and specify that each polygon should be blue and any other shape should be red.

    >>> import shapefile
    >>> def my_shapes_generator():
    ...     sf = shapefile.Reader(filename)
    ...     for shape in sf.shapes():
    ...         if shape.shapeType == shapefile.POLYGON:
    ...             kwargs = {'fill': (0, 0, 255)}
    ...         else:
    ...             kwargs = {'fill': (255, 0, 0)}
    ...         yield (shape, kwargs)
    ... cw.add_shapes(img, area_def, my_shapes_generator())