Gracefully handle NULL numeric, date fields #16
Merged
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Though the DBase spec doesn't allow NULL values, QGIS allows one to write/edit a Shapefile with specially-encoded NULL values. It does this by writing full-width '*' characters for numeric types, and '0' characters for date types.
Pyshp blows up with a ValueError when parsing these NULL values. This patch gracefully handles these specially-encoded NULLs, and hands back None as a value, which is much more Pythonic than casting incorrectly to 0 or [0, 0, 0] respectively.
Also attached is a simple example Shapefile created by QGIS with NULL values.