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Input Formats and Other Sources🔗

pyosmium can read OSM data from different sources and in different formats.

Supported file formats🔗

pyosmium has built-in support for the most common OSM data formats as well as formats specific to libosmium. The format to use is usually determined by the suffix of the file name. The following table gives an overview over the suffix recognised, the corresponding format and if the formats support reading and/or writing.

Suffix Reading Writing Format
.pbf protobuf-based PBF format
.osm Original XML format
.xml ⁠ ⁠ ⁠
.o5m Custom format created by the osmc tools
.opl Osmium's line based text format OPL
.debug a verbose human-readable format
.ids Text format only containing the object IDs

All formats also support compression with gzip (suffix .gz) and bzip2 (suffix .bz2) with the exception of the PBF format.

The suffixes may be further prefixed by three subtypes:

  • .osm - A simple OSM data file. Each object appears at most with one version in the file.
  • .osc - An OSM change file. Multiple versions of an object may appear in the file. The file is usually not reference-complete.
  • .osh - An OSM history file. Objects appear with all available versions in the file. The file is usually reference-complete.

Thus the type .osh.xml.bz2 would be an OSM history file in XML format that has been compressed using the bzip2 algorithm.

If you have file inputs where the suffix differs from the internal format, the file type can be explicitly set by instantiating an osmium.io.File object. It takes an optional format parameter which then must contain the suffix notation of the desired file format.

Example

This example forces the given input text file to be read as OPL.

fp = osmium.FileProcessor(osmium.io.File('assorted.txt', 'opl'))

Using standard input and output🔗

The special file name - can be used to read from standard input or write to standard output.

When reading data, use a File object to specify the file format. With the SimpleReader, you need to use the parameter filetype.

Example

This code snipped dumps all ids of your input file to the console.

with osmium.SimpleWriter('-', filetype='ids') as writer:
    for o in osmium.FileProcessor('test.pbf'):
        writer.add(o)

Reading from buffers🔗

pyosmium can also read data from a in-memory byte buffer. Simply wrap the buffer in a osmium.io.FileBuffer. The file format always needs to be explicitly given.

Example

Reading from a buffer comes in handy when loading OSM data from a URL. This example computes statistics over data downloaded from an URL.

import urllib.request as urlrequest

data = urlrequest.urlopen('https://example.com/some.osm.gz').read()

counter = {'n': 0, 'w': 0, 'r': 0}

for o in osmium.FileProcessor(osmium.io.FileBuffer(data, 'osm.gz')):
    counter[o.type_str()] += 1

print("Nodes: %d" % counter['n'])
print("Ways: %d" % counter['w'])
print("Relations: %d" % counter['r'])