What's in the zip
A shapefile can only hold one geometry type, so the zip contains up to three layers:
<name>_points— Point and MultiPoint features (multi-points are written as separate points)<name>_lines— LineString and MultiLineString features<name>_polygons— Polygon and MultiPolygon features, holes included
Each layer has the usual .shp, .shx and .dbf files, a .prj declaring WGS84 (EPSG:4326) and a .cpg declaring UTF-8 text.
Attributes
GeoJSON properties become DBF columns. The DBF format has limits that every shapefile writer must respect:
- Column names are cut to 10 characters (duplicates get a suffix such as
_1). - Text values are cut to 254 bytes.
- Numbers become numeric columns; objects and arrays are written as JSON text.
GeometryCollections are split by type across the layers, and Z values are dropped (2D shapefiles). If you need names longer than 10 characters or nested data, GeoJSON or GeoPackage is a better format.