The records can be displayed spatially either as a point

defined by X and Y coordinates, or using a Well Known Text (WKT) definition of a geometry which may

describe points, lines, and polygons of arbitrary complexity. The file can also be loaded as an attribute

</p>

<p>

will choose the type of field based on its contents.

</p>

<h4><a name="creating">Creating a delimited text layer</a></h4>

<h5>Choosing the data file</h5>

<p>Use the &quot;Browse...&quot; button to select the data file. Once the file is selected the

layer name will automatically be populated based on the file name. The layer name is used to represent

</p>

<p>

By default files are assumed to be encoded as UTF-8. However other file

encodings can be selected. For example &quot;System&quot; uses the default encoding for the operating system.

</p>

<h5>Specifying the file format</h5>

<p>The file format can be one of

<li>Well known text (WKT) geometry: each feature is represented as a well known text string, for example

<tt>POINT(1.525622 51.20836)</tt>. See details of the <a href="#wkt">well known text</a> format.

<li>No geometry (attribute only table): records will not be displayed on the map, but can be viewed

</ul>

<p>For point coordinates the following options apply:</p>

<ul>

<li>X field: specifies the field containing the X coordinate</li>

<li>Y field: specifies the field containing the Y coordinate</li>

<li>DMS angles: if selected coordinates are represented as degrees/minutes/seconds

A valid DMS coordinate will contain three numeric fields with an optional hemisphere prefix or suffix

(N, E, or + are positive, S, W, or - are negative). Additional non numeric characters are

generally discarded. For example <tt>N41d54'01.54&quot;</tt> is a valid coordinate.

<ul>

<li>Geometry field: the field containing the well known text definition.</li>

<li>Geometry type: one of &quot;Detect&quot; (detect), &quot;Point&quot;, &quot;Line&quot;, or &quot;Polygon&quot;.

which geometry type is displayed in text files containing multiple geometry types. Records containing

other geometry types are discarded.

If &quot;Detect&quot; is selected then the type of the first geometry in the file will be used.

<h4><a name="regexp">How regular expression delimiters work</a></h4>

<p>Regular expressions are mini-language used to represent character patterns. There are many variations

<p>In a regular expression delimited file each line is treated as a record. Each match of the regular expression in the line is treated as the end of a field.

If the regular expression contains capture groups (eg <tt>(cat|dog)</tt>)

then these are extracted as fields.

data record in the file. However if this does not contain attribute names, then they will be named <tt>field_1</tt>, <tt>field_2</tt>, and so on.

Also if records have more fields than are defined in the header record then these

will be named <tt>field_#</tt>, where # is the field number (note that empty fields at the end of a record are ignored).

the names in the text file if they are numbers, or have names like <tt>field_#</tt>,

or are duplicated.

</p>

<p>

feature id to each record. This is the line number in the source file on which

the record starts.

</p>

<li><tt>geomType=(auto|point|line|polygon|none)</tt> specifies type of geometry for wkt fields, or none to load the file as an attribute-only table. The default is auto.</li>

<li><tt>crs=...</tt> specifies the coordinate system to use for the vector layer, in a format accepted by QgsCoordinateReferenceSystem.createFromString (for example &quot;EPSG:4167&quot;). If this is not

specified then a dialog box may request this information from the user

</ul>