Cannot link external data with TopoJSON

Question

I am trying to link a shapefile europe.shp with a data.csv external file while producing a TopoJSON file. They both have the iso_a3 country code as common ID.

This is the head of data.csv:

iso_a3;anzahl_jets;typen1;typen2;typen3;text;pop
ALB;;;;;;3639453
AND;;;;;;83888
AUT;15;15 Eurofighter;;;;8210281
BEL;81;59 F-16;22 alte Saab;;;10414336

Converting europe.shp to europe.json alone works fine, all properties are preserved. When using the below statement though, only the properties of europe.shp are preserved (iso_a3 and name_de).

topojson --id-property iso_a3 -o europe.json -p iso_a3,jets=+anzahl_jets,pop=+pop,name_de=name_de --simplify-proportion 0.25 --width 900 --height 600 --external-properties data.csv -- countries=europe.shp

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

topojson doesn't parse ;-delimited CSV files. You need to use , or \t (the latter preferably with a file extension .tsv).

See https://github.com/mbostock/topojson/blob/master/bin/topojson#L369-L374