WKT (Well-Known Text)

WKT (Well-Known Text) is the textual encoding of geometry from the OGC standard: POINT(37.6177 55.7558), LINESTRING(...), POLYGON((...)). It is understood by every spatial database and library — PostGIS, SpatiaLite, Shapely, JTS, GEOS — and it can be read by eye, which makes the format indispensable while debugging.

The export is taken when geometry is needed as text: to paste into an SQL query, to put into a test, to pass coordinates to someone else's system, to take a quick look at what came out of the selected area at all.

The output is a single text file in UTF-8. At the top are comments with the bounding box of the area and the coordinate system, then it goes layer by layer: a line like "-- layer: roads" with one geometry per line underneath it. Coordinates are in WGS84 (EPSG:4326) with six decimal places — that is about ten centimeters on the ground.

One important thing: WKT stores shapes only. There are no names, types or other OpenStreetMap tags in the file — if you need attributes, take GeoJSON, GeoPackage or a CSV with a WKT column.