Make raster from dbf of shapefile

dbf2Raster.py

# create raster from dbf of shapefile
# this works only if dbf is set up reading 
# left to right across rows and top down
from osgeo import ogr, gdal
from collections import OrderedDict
from StreamCat_functions import dbf2DF    

shp = 'shapes.shp'
att = 'TD_N'
tbl = dbf2DF(shp.split('.')[0] + '.dbf')

meta = OrderedDict()
meta['ncols'] = 459
meta['nrows'] = 299
meta['xllcorner'] = -2556000
meta['yllcorner'] = -1728000
meta['cellsize'] = 12000
meta['nodata_value'] = -999.000000

f = open('out.asc','w')

for m in meta:
    f.write(m + ' ' + str(meta[m]) + '\n')

start = 0
for i in range(meta['nrows']):
    stop = start + meta['ncols']
    for d in tbl[att][start:stop].tolist():
        f.write(str(d) + ' ')
    f.write('\n')
    start = stop    
f.close()

driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile')
dataset = driver.Open(shp)    
layer = dataset.GetLayer()
spatialRef = layer.GetSpatialRef() 
ds_in = gdal.Open('out.asc')
drv = gdal.GetDriverByName('GTiff')
ds_out = drv.CreateCopy('out.tif', ds_in)
ds_out.SetProjection(spatialRef.ExportToWkt())
ds_in = None
ds_out = None