Laspy is a python library for reading, modifying and creating LAS LiDAR files.

Laspy is a pythonic library for reading, modifying and writing LAS files. Support for LAZ files rely on the external libraries LASzip and LAStools and is limited to reading LAS version 1.0-1.3 files. Laspy is compatible with Python 2.6+ and 3.5+.

Laspy includes a set of command line tools which can be used to do basic file operations like format translation and validation as well as comparing LAS files.

A simple example to show the basics of Laspy. Here we create an output file that only consists of terrain points from the input file:

from laspy.file import File
import numpy as np

inFile = File('/path/to/file.las', mode='r')

I = inFile.Classification == 2

outFile = File('/path/to/output.las', mode='w', header=inFile.header)
outFile.points = inFile.points[I]
outFile.close()

API Documentation and tutorials are available at PythonHosted.

Laspy can be installed either with pip:

pip install laspy

or by running the setup script included in the source distribution:

python setup.py build --user
python setup.py install --user

Laspy is only dependent on numpy and should therefore work on Linux, OS X and Windows as long as a working installation of numpy is available.

To install LASzip and LAStools for LAZ support on Unix systems:

git clone https://github.com/LASzip/LASzip.git
cd LASzip
git checkout 3.4.3
cmake .
make
sudo make install

and

wget https://lastools.org/download/LAStools.zip
unzip LAStools.zip
cd LAStools
make
sudo cp bin/laszip /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/laszip /usr/local/bin laszip-cli

• Fixed bug in point record format 5, 9 and 10 #105
• Return explicit msg if laszip executable was not found #110
• Supprt numpy 1.17 #122

• Bug fix #92
• Test creation of all valid custom dimension data types
• Modify handling of extra bytes to be char data instead of numeric byte data

• Bug fixes #67, #75, b02b40900b5
• Allow usage of laszip-cli when working with LAZ files #77

• Improved memory handling in base.FileManager #48
• Introduced r- file mode, that only reads the header of as LAS file #48
• LAS v. 1.4 bug fixes #55
• Python 3 support #62