DBF only

[AlainFELER]

The class Reader comment says "If one of the three files (.shp, .shx, .dbf) is missing no exception is thrown until you try to call a method that depends on that particular file." but if the .shp AND the .shx are missing it throws an exception.
It would be nice if the library accepted to open a .dbf alone : of course a shp with no .shp and no .shx is a poor one, but shapefile would still be very useful to analyse fields, compare dbfs, and some other things. Other libraries like dbf do that, but they have their own problems (no "introspection" with dbf for example).

[flother]

Good news: you can use pyshp to read a DBF file only. When you instantiate a Reader object, pass in a file-like object using the dbf argument but don't pass in a shapefile:

import shapefile

sf = shapefile.Reader(dbf=open("example.dbf", "rb"))
for record in sf.iterRecords():
    pass

[karimbahgat]

Agree that the implementation did not fully live up to the docs. As @flother pointed out, this was only implemented when passing file-like objects. cb7f124 implements the same flexibility for filepaths, including to read standalone dbf files.