programming and shapefiles

hello everyone,
I have a problem with handling shapefiles. Those files contain
information about roads, some attributes are accessible in DBF files,
where I can find such information as road name, section, ... and also
information to which part of the road some section belong, ... But
there is no attribute like lon/lat or some kind of coordinates I need
to use in other software, actually for some kind of selfmade web
application. I know that there is somewhere information I need because
ArcMap programm has an utility to show "real" coordinates. How do I
get these "real" coords? Do I have to write an utility for extraction
geometry data from shapefiles directly?
PS. I am a newbie to GIS, be patient :)

SHP file documentation:
http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf

You can also try:
http://shapelib.maptools.org/

Regards
Uffe

Alex wrote:

A 'shapefile' actually comprises at least three, interlinked, files - of
types shp, shx and dbf. You have found the attribute data in the dbf
file, for each record there there is a record in the shp file that holds
the coordinate data.

You have already been pointed to ESRI's descriptive White Paper: do read
that. There are two (related) Open Source libraries available to help a
programmer who must manage these data: shapelib and gdal (which offers a
wide range of other spatial formats in addition). Get gdal from
www.gdal.org.

Best wishes,

Peter

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