2008 TIGER/Line® Shapefiles from Census.gov -> Google Maps

Question

How do I take shapefiles and extract lat/lng coords so I can plot polygons on Google Maps?

http://www2.census.gov/cgi-bin/shapefiles/national-files

I asked this question here:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread/thread/18763b4b0cb996c7

and they told me WHAT to do, but not HOW to do it =P

Thx!

Answer 1

It depends on how you need to accomplish this. If you just need a few shapes, you can look up the coordinates in those files yourself. You can use those coordinates to create a GPolygon in Google Maps.

If you need lots of shapes - you'll need to do it programmatically. I would suggest using your favorite language to parse the XML file and retrieve the coordinates for each shape.