Supply formats overview

CSV and GeoPackage

GeoPackage is an open, standard, platform-independent, portable, self-describing, compact format for transferring geospatial information. For more information on this format, please see the Getting started with GeoPackag guide.

The following tables give a comparison between the CSV attributes and the GeoPackage attribution:

CSV attribution and format

Mnemonic	Description	Data type	Size
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
PC	Postcode	A8	8
PQ	Positional_quality_indicator	I2	2
EA	Eastings	I6	*
NO	Northings	I7	*
CY	Country_code	A9	9
RH	NHS_regional_HA_code	A9	9
LH	NHS_HA_code	A9	9
CC	Admin_county_code	A9	9
DC	Admin_district_code	A9	9
WC	Admin_ward_code	A9	9

GeoPackage attribution and format

Description	Data type
fid	int
postcode	TEXT
positional_quality_indicator	int
N/A	N/A
country_code	TEXT
nhs_regional_ha_code	TEXT
nhs_ha_code	TEXT
admin_county_code	TEXT
admin_district_code	TEXT
admin_ward_code	TEXT

CSV format

• Those fields containing text (A) will be enclosed by double quotes which have not been included in the sizes listed in the table above. An asterisk (*) denotes variable length.

• Fields with null data will appear as "" for text and 0 for numeric.

• Each record will be terminated with a carriage return character (ASCII 13) and a line feed character (ASCII 10).

Example of a Code-Point Open CSV record:

"SO16 0AS",10,437292,115542,"E92000001","E19000002","E18000009","E10000014","E07000093","E05012936"

GeoPackage format

Note that there are no Eastings or Northings in GeoPackage; the geometry is already created in the GeoPackage container and is not listed as data but will be seen as a column in a database (PostGIS) called geometry with a coordinate reference system of British National Grid

EPSG: 27700 for Great Britain (GB) postcodes.

Fields with a null value will appear as [Null] for text (PostGIS) or as an empty field in a GIS. A null numeric value will appear as 0 in both a database and an attribute table in a GIS.

Example of a Code-Point Open GeoPackage record taken from the Information tool in QGIS:

GeoPackage record as displayed in QGIS.