If you don't want to read the whole file, another solution is to use a generator as in Only read specific attribute columns of a shapefile with Geopandas / Fiona
As a reminder (from What does the “yield” keyword do?):
- Everything you can use "for... in..." on is an iterable: lists, strings, files... but you store all the values in memory
- Generators are iterables, but you can only read them once. It's because they do not store all the values in memory, they generate the values on the fly
When you use Fiona to read a shapefile, the result is a generator and not a simple list and with the list of rows [0,4,7], we don't need to read all the records of the shapefile but only until the last element in the list.
The generator
def records(filename, list): list = sorted(list) # if the elements of the list are not sorted with fiona.open(filename) as source: for i, feature in enumerate(source[:max(list)+1]): if i in list: yield feature gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(records("test.shp", [4,0,7]))
Result
It is also possible to adapt the solution of rick debbout by converting the list comprehension (will create the entire list in memory first) into generator expression (will create the items on the fly)
def getRows2(fn, idxList): reader = fiona.open(fn) return gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features((reader[x] for x in idxList))
And if you want to extract a continuous slice, 8 to 12 for example, it is easier
c = fiona.open('test.shp') gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(c[8:13])
