Named annotations in *meta_[clihf].dat files

Hi ladies and gentlemen,

I was wondering how the *.dat files were generated, and if it would be possible to annotate some of them with their names in some standardized format. For instance, for countries, we could append another field after the #bytes value that contains the ISO2 name of the country of the coordinates listed. Then one could build LineCollections for each country and do fun per-country graphing.

Otherwise, we need to use shapefiles -- not all that bad except they might not match the specified resolution or even the data included in basemap.

I'd love to submit patches, but unfortunately there's no rhyme or reason to the internal organization of the *.dat files. I hypothesize having their source will facilitate such a transformation.

Thoughts?

Inizia tracciando come vengono generati i file meta_[clihf].dat e comprendendone l’organizzazione interna, quindi esamina il campo standardizzato proposto dopo il valore #bytes. Considera i casi d’uso di country ISO2 e LineCollection insieme all’approccio shapefile esistente. Il lavoro è completato quando il progetto dispone di un formato deciso e documentato e di una fonte o di un percorso di trasformazione chiaro.