pycartosym

A Python package for lossless transcoding between CartoSym CSS (.cscss) and other encodings of the OGC Cartographic Symbology conceptual model (CS-JSON, SLD/SE), plus MapLibre Style as a practical interoperability target.

Supported Formats

CartoSym-CSS (.cscss) and CS-JSON (.cs.json) are the two OGC Cartographic Symbology encodings this package reads and writes losslessly. SLD/SE (.sld, 1.1.0 and 1.0.0, including SLD 1.0.0 with GeoServer <VendorOption> pass-through) is also OGC. MapLibre Style (.json) is the MapLibre/Mapbox de facto spec, not OGC, supported as a practical interoperability target. All are read and written.

Each codec is covered for the constructs the target format actually expresses (a symbolizer or property with no equivalent on the other side raises rather than silently dropping data).

Installation

From PyPI

pip install pycartosym

From Source

git clone https://github.com/maxcollombin/pycartosym.git
cd pycartosym
uv sync --all-extras

The generated ANTLR lexer/parser are already committed under src/pycartosym/grammar/generated/, so no separate grammar build step is needed. Prefix commands with uv run, or activate the project's .venv with source .venv/bin/activate.

Usage

# Format auto-detected from the file extensions where that's unambiguous
cartosym <input-file> -o <output-file>

# Explicit target format (needed for the SLD dialects and MapLibre,
# since a plain .sld/.json extension can't disambiguate those)
cartosym --to-format <sld|sld:1.0.0|sld:geoserver|maplibre|cscss|csjson> <input-file> -o <output-file>

# Display structure info for a CSCSS file, without converting it
cartosym parse <input-file>

# Validate a .cscss or .cs.json file against the grammar/JSON schema
cartosym validate <input-file>

# Full option and format reference
cartosym --help

A few concrete conversions, using the files under examples/ (examples/sld/ for SLD/SE):

cartosym examples/0-basic.cscss -o out.cs.json
cartosym examples/13-vector-point-circle.cscss --to-format sld -o out.sld
cartosym examples/sld/1-polygon-fill-stroke.sld --to-format maplibre -o out.json

Python API

Most users work through the cartosym CLI above. The cql2 submodule also exposes CQL2 (the OGC 21-065r2 query-expression sublanguage that CartoSym-CSS embeds in [ filter ] selectors and CS-JSON encodes as {"op": …, "args": …}) as a stable, importable API:

from pycartosym import cql2

# CQL2-Text -> expression model
expr = cql2.parse_text("population > 1000")

# Expression model -> CQL2-JSON
cql2.to_cql2_json(expr)
# {'op': '>', 'args': [{'property': 'population'}, 1000]}

# CQL2-JSON selector dict -> CartoSym-CSS filter text
cql2.to_cql2_text({
    "op": "and",
    "args": [
        {"op": "=", "args": [{"property": "a"}, 1]},
        {"op": "like", "args": [{"property": "b"}, "x%"]},
    ],
})
# "a = 1 and b like 'x%'"

# Operator/function vocabulary, derived from the CQL2 Pydantic models
cql2.vocab.SPATIAL_RELATE                       # 's_relate'
"s_intersects" in cql2.vocab.KNOWN_CQL2_CALLS   # True

cql2.parse_tree is a lower-level entry point for converting an already-parsed ANTLR expression context (as produced while walking the CartoSym-CSS grammar) — most callers want parse_text.

Development

uv sync --all-extras
uv run pytest

License

See LICENSE.