Roads Shapefile Names

I have a shapefile with a road network and it seems like the 开发者_开发知识库roads are all listed as 1 big polyline. Is this typical is it possible to get a road network where the roads are listed individually and have names associated with them?

thanks, Jeff

If someone sent me a shapefile of roads where all the roads were a single polyline, I would assume the person was playing a practical joke on me.

Typically, a useful shapefile of roads would at least be broken into a single line for each defined road, or even better, a network intersection-to-intersection segment shapes.

It's not a trivial task to split up a single polyline into a more useful multi-segmented shapefile.

Doing a quick Google search returns a couple of free solutions for shapefile editors although I can't vouch for any of them. I use my company's own codebase written in C# using Tatuk for working with shapefiles.

• http://www.nrdb.co.uk/nrdbview/
• http://www.forestpal.com/blog/?p=21