A Shapefile viewer lets you open an ESRI .shp file and see its geometry and attributes without installing QGIS, ArcGIS, or any desktop GIS. Shapefiles are a binary format made of several sibling files, which makes a quick peek awkward. This tool parses the geometry and the dBASE attribute table directly in your browser and draws everything to scale.
How it works
The .shp file follows the ESRI Shapefile Technical Description. It begins with a 100-byte header that includes the dataset’s bounding box, then a sequence of variable-length records. Each record header stores a big-endian content length, and the geometry itself uses little-endian doubles. The viewer reads the shape type of every record and decodes Point, MultiPoint, PolyLine, and Polygon features — including the Z and M variants — extracting the X and Y coordinates and the part offsets that separate rings.
The .dbf file is a classic dBASE table: a header listing each field’s name and byte width, followed by fixed-length records. The parser reads those field definitions, walks each record by summing field widths, decodes the bytes as text, and drops any record marked deleted. The geometry is then projected into an SVG canvas (Y is flipped so north points up) and the attributes are listed in a scrollable table.
Notes and tips
Always pick the .shp and .dbf from the same export so the rows line up. The preview is coordinate-system agnostic — it simply scales whatever units the file uses — so it works for both projected and geographic data. Because parsing runs entirely client-side, the viewer functions offline and never sends your GIS data anywhere.