Reading raw data into geopandas

As indicated by @littlexsparkee, geopandas can now read known file formats directly from url's (this is possible since version 0.4), e.g.:

import geopandas as gpd

geojson_url = "https://data.cityofnewyork.us/api/geospatial/arq3-7z49?method=export&format=GeoJSON"
gdf1 = gpd.read_file(geojson_url)

gpkg_url = 'http://www.geopackage.org/data/gdal_sample.gpkg'
gdf2 = gpd.read_file(gpkg_url)

zip_url = 'https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/STATE/2010/tl_2010_31_state10.zip'
gdf3 = gpd.read_file(zip_url)

Since Geopandas 0.8 it is also possible to directly read filelike objects. The example in the question now works for instance:

import geopandas as gpd
import io
import requests

request = requests.get("https://data.cityofnewyork.us/api/geospatial/arq3-7z49?method=export&format=GeoJSON")
gpd.read_file(io.BytesIO(request.content))

or, similarly, for a geopackage

request = requests.get('http://www.geopackage.org/data/gdal_sample.gpkg')
gpd.read_file(io.BytesIO(request.content))

(I have not managed to reproduce this for shapefiles or zip-files however.)

See the geopandas docs for some more examples.

I prefer the result obtained by using the undocumented GeoDataFrame.from_features() rather than passing the GeoJSON to the GDF constructor directly:

import geopandas as gpd
import requests
data = requests.get("https://data.cityofnewyork.us/api/geospatial/arq3-7z49?method=export&format=GeoJSON")
gpd.GeoDataFrame().from_features(data.json())

Output

                       geometry                         name                                url           line objectid                                              notes
0    POINT (-73.99107 40.73005)                     Astor Pl  http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/  4-6-6 Express        1  4 nights, 6-all times, 6 Express-weekdays AM s...
1    POINT (-74.00019 40.71880)                     Canal St  http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/  4-6-6 Express        2  4 nights, 6-all times, 6 Express-weekdays AM s...
2    POINT (-73.98385 40.76173)                      50th St  http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/            1-2        3                              1-all times, 2-nights
3    POINT (-73.97500 40.68086)                    Bergen St  http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/          2-3-4        4           4-nights, 3-all other times, 2-all times
4    POINT (-73.89489 40.66471)             Pennsylvania Ave  http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/            3-4        5                        4-nights, 3-all other times

The resulting GeoDataFrame has the geometry column set correctly and all the columns as I would expect, without needing to unnest any FeatureCollections

When using Fiona 1.8, this can (must?) be done using that project's MemoryFile or ZipMemoryFile.

For example:

import fiona.io
import geopandas as gpd
import requests

response = requests.get('http://example.com/Some_shapefile.zip')
data_bytes = response.content

with fiona.io.ZipMemoryFile(data_bytes) as zip_memory_file:
    with zip_memory_file.open('Some_shapefile.shp') as collection:
      geodf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(collection, crs=collection.crs)

The easiest way is inputting the GeoJSON URL directly into the gpd.read_file() function. I'd tried extracting a shapefile from a zip before this using BytesIO & zipfile and had issues with gpd (specifically Fiona) accepting file-like objects.

import geopandas as gpd
import David.SQL_pull_by_placename as sql
import os

os.environ['PROJ_LIB'] = r'C:UserslittlexsparkeeAnaconda3Libraryshareproj'

geojson_url = f'https://github.com/loganpowell/census-geojson/blob/master/GeoJSON/500k/2018/{sql.state}/block-group.json?raw=true'
census_tracts_gdf = gpd.read_file(geojson_url)

Since fiona.BytesCollection doesn't seem to work for TopoJSON here an solution that works for all without the need of gdal:

import fiona
import geopandas as gpd
import requests

# parse the topojson file into memory
request = requests.get('https://vega.github.io/vega-datasets/data/us-10m.json')
visz = fiona.ogrext.buffer_to_virtual_file(bytes(request.content))

# read the features from a fiona collection into a GeoDataFrame
with fiona.Collection(visz, driver='TopoJSON') as f:
    gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(f, crs=f.crs)

Yes, it is possible now with Fiona (see https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/issues/409). I'm not sure if this feature is exposed yet in Geopandas.

You can pass the json directly to the GeoDataFrame constructor:

import geopandas as gpd
import requests
data = requests.get("https://data.cityofnewyork.us/api/geospatial/arq3-7z49?method=export&format=GeoJSON")
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(data.json())
gdf.head()

Outputs:

                                            features               type
0  {'type': 'Feature', 'geometry': {'type': 'Poin...  FeatureCollection
1  {'type': 'Feature', 'geometry': {'type': 'Poin...  FeatureCollection
2  {'type': 'Feature', 'geometry': {'type': 'Poin...  FeatureCollection
3  {'type': 'Feature', 'geometry': {'type': 'Poin...  FeatureCollection
4  {'type': 'Feature', 'geometry': {'type': 'Poin...  FeatureCollection

For supported single-file formats or zipped shapefiles, you can use fiona.BytesCollection and GeoDataFrame.from_features:

import requests
import fiona
import geopandas as gpd

url = 'http://www.geopackage.org/data/gdal_sample.gpkg'
request = requests.get(url)
b = bytes(request.content)
with fiona.BytesCollection(b) as f:
    crs = f.crs
    gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(f, crs=crs)
    print(gdf.head())

and for zipped shapefiles (supported as of fiona 1.7.2)

url = 'https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/STATE/2010/tl_2010_31_state10.zip'
request = requests.get(url)
b = bytes(request.content)
with fiona.BytesCollection(b) as f:
    crs = f.crs
    gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(f, crs=crs)
    print(gdf.head())

You can find out what formats Fiona supports using something like:

import fiona
for name, access in fiona.supported_drivers.items():
    print('{}: {}'.format(name, access))

And a hacky workaround for reading in-memory zipped data in fiona 1.7.1 or earlier:

import requests
import uuid
import fiona
import geopandas as gpd
from osgeo import gdal

request = requests.get('https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/trunk/autotest/ogr/data/poly.zip?raw=true')
vsiz = '/vsimem/{}.zip'.format(uuid.uuid4().hex) #gdal/ogr requires a .zip extension

gdal.FileFromMemBuffer(vsiz,bytes(request.content))
with fiona.Collection(vsiz, vsi='zip', layer ='poly') as f:
    gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(f, crs=f.crs)
    print(gdf.head())