A shapefile is a popular format for representing geospatial vector data. You can use the geopandas library, which is built on top of pandas and can be used in combination with SciPy to read and manipulate shapefiles. First, make sure you have geopandas installed:
pip install geopandas
Here's an example of how to read a shapefile and perform basic operations:
import geopandas as gpd
# Read a shapefile
gdf = gpd.read_file('path_to_shapefile.shp')
# Print the first few rows of the DataFrame
print(gdf.head())
# Plot the shapefile
gdf.plot()