The PDAL Python extension allows you to process data with PDAL into Numpy arrays. Additionally, you can use it to fetch schema and metadata from PDAL operations.

The repository for PDAL's Python extension is available at https://github.com/PDAL/python

It is released independently from PDAL itself as of PDAL 1.7.

Given the following pipeline, which simply reads an ASPRS LAS file and sorts it by the X dimension:

json = """
{
  "pipeline": [
    "1.2-with-color.las",
    {
        "type": "filters.sort",
        "dimension": "X"
    }
  ]
}"""

import pdal
pipeline = pdal.Pipeline(json)
pipeline.validate() # check if our JSON and options were good
pipeline.loglevel = 8 #really noisy
count = pipeline.execute()
arrays = pipeline.arrays
metadata = pipeline.metadata
log = pipeline.log

• PDAL 1.7+
• Python >=2.7 (including Python 3.x)
• Cython (eg pip install cython)
• Packaging (eg pip install packaging)