Bug fixes:

• Fix recently introduced issue where Reader/Writer closes file-like objects provided by user (#244)

New Features:

• Added support for pathlib and path-like shapefile filepaths (@mwtoews).
• Allow reading individual file extensions via filepaths.

Improvements:

• Simplified setup and deployment (@mwtoews)
• Faster shape access when missing shx file
• Switch to named logger (see #240)

Bug fixes:

• More robust handling of corrupt shapefiles (fixes #235)
• Fix errors when writing to individual file-handles (fixes #237)
• Revert previous decision to enforce geojson output ring orientation (detailed explanation at SciTools/cartopy#2012)
• Fix test issues in environments without network access (@sebastic, @musicinmybrain).

New Features:

• Read shapefiles directly from zipfiles.
• Read shapefiles directly from urls.
• Allow fast extraction of only a subset of dbf fields through a fields arg.
• Allow fast filtering which shapes to read from the file through a bbox arg.

Improvements:

• More examples and restructuring of README.
• More informative Shape to geojson warnings (see #219).
• Shape object information when calling repr().
• Faster ring orientation checks, enforce geojson output ring orientation.

Bug fixes:

• Remove null-padding at end of some record character fields.
• Fix dbf writing error when the number of record list or dict entries didn't match the number of fields.
• Handle rare garbage collection issue after deepcopy (mattijn/topojson#120)
• Fix bug where records and shapes would be assigned incorrect record number (@karanrn)
• Fix typos in docs (@timgates)

Bug fixes:

• Fix recent bug in geojson hole-in-polygon checking (see #205)
• Misc fixes to allow geo interface dump to json (eg dates as strings)
• Handle additional dbf date null values, and return faulty dates as unicode (see #187)
• Add writer target typecheck
• Fix bugs to allow reading shp/shx/dbf separately
• Allow delayed shapefile loading by passing no args
• Fix error with writing empty z/m shapefile (@mcuprjak)
• Fix signed_area() so ignores z/m coords
• Enforce writing the 11th field name character as null-terminator (only first 10 are used)
• Minor README fixes
• Added more tests

Bug fixes:

• Fix issue where warnings.simplefilter('always') changes global warning behavior [see #203]

Improvements:

• Handle shapes with no coords and represent as geojson with no coords (GeoJSON null-equivalent)
• Expand testing to Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 and PyPy; drop 3.3 and 3.4
• Added pytest testing

Bug fixes:

• Fix incorrect geo interface handling of multipolygons with complex exterior-hole relations
• Enforce shapefile requirement of at least one field, to avoid writing invalid shapefiles
• Fix Reader geo interface including DeletionFlag field in feature properties
• Fix polygons not being auto closed, which was accidentally dropped
• Fix error for null geometries in feature geojson
• Misc docstring cleanup

New Features:

• Added back read/write support for unicode field names.
• Improved Record representation
• More support for geojson on Reader, ShapeRecord, ShapeRecords, and shapes()

Bug fixes:

• Fixed error when reading optional m-values
• Fixed Record attribute autocomplete in Python 3
• Misc readme cleanup

Fix pip install setup.py README decoding error.

Major new version. See README or changelog.txt.

• Fixed errors caused by strict value type checking, as introduced in v1.2.11. Now more lenient by attempting force conversion of values to match the field type.
• Allow reading file-like objects without seek method (such as ZipFile or urllib.urlopen).