Delimited Text Plugin¶

Requirements¶

To view a delimited text file as layer, the text file must contain:

1. A delimited header row of field names. This must be the first line in the text file.
2. The header row must contain an X and Y field. These fields can have any name.
3. The x and y coordinates must be specified as a number. The coordinate system is not important.

As an example of a valid text file we import the elevation point data file elevp.csv coming with the QGIS sample dataset (See Section Sample Data):

X;Y;ELEV
-300120;7689960;13
-654360;7562040;52
1640;7512840;3
[...]

Some items of note about the text file are:

1. The example text file uses ; (semicolon) as delimiter. Any character can be used to delimit the fields.
2. The first row is the header row. It contains the fields X, Y and ELEV.
3. No quotes (") are used to delimit text fields.
4. The x coordinates are contained in the X field.
5. The y coordinates are contained in the Y field.

Using the Plugin¶

To use the plugin you must first enable it as described in Section Managing Plugins.

Click the new toolbar icon ^{Add Delimited Text Layer} to open the Delimited Text dialog as shown in figure_delimited_text_1.

Figure Delimited Text 1:

Delimited Text Dialog

First select the file (e.g., qgis_sample_data/csv/elevp.csv) to import by clicking on the [Browse] button. Once the file is selected, the plugin attempts to parse the file using the last used delimiter, in this case a semicolon (;). To properly parse the file, it is important to select the correct delimiter. To change the delimiter to tab use \t (this is a regular expression for the tab character).

Once the file is parsed, choose the X and Y fields from the dropdown lists and if available also the WKT field for the CRS information. Finally enter a Layer name (e.g., elevp ) as shown in figure_delimited_text_1 . To add the layer to the map, click [OK]. The delimited text file now behaves as any other map layer in QGIS.