Vector remove small lines

Q: How to remove small vector lines? I want only delete spurious lines.

A: You may choose from the following approach (please read all of them before starting):

Approach 1:

To delete isolated lines which are not connected to the main "network", use:

  v.net.alloc in={your input vector} out={output vector} ... (TBD)

Approach 2:

To globally delete short vector segments, considering them as dangles, use:

  v.clean in={your input vector} tool=rmdangle thresh={your threshold} out={output vector}

Approach 3:

• use v.build.polylines to join broken vector segments into longer segments
• then use v.to.db with option=length (line length) to upload the vector segment lengths to the attribute table

  v.db.addcol mypolyline column="length_km double precision"
  v.to.db mypolyline type=line option=length units=k column=length_km

• now use v.extract to extract the longer vector segments into a new map according to a threshold you need. Example: Extract line features longer than 5km (cleans out the noise):

  v.extract in=mypolyline out=mypolyline_over5km type=line where="length_km > 5.0"

Approach 4:

To remove all lines with a length shorter than 50 map units (thresh: threshold distance (coords,snap,query)) globally:

v.edit mymap tool=delete query=length thresh=-1,0,-50 type=line

You can also define a bounding box in v.edit to limit the operation to a subset of the map.

See also

• http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/48265/how-to-find-dead-ends-in-a-road-network