read.shape {maptools}R Documentation

Read shapefile into Map object

Description

Read shapefile into Map object; the file should be given including its ".shp" extension, and the function will reconstruct the names of the database (dbf) file and the index (shx) file from these.

Usage

read.shape(filen, dbf.data = TRUE)
getinfo.shape(filen)

Arguments

filen name of file with *.shp extension, or *.dbf for dbf.read()
dbf.data read DBF data together with shapes, default TRUE

Details

The function calls code from shapelib to read shapefiles, a file format used by ESRI GIS software among others

Value

read.shape() returns either a list of shapes of class ShapeList, or if dbf.data = TRUE a Map object with:

Shapes a list of shapes of class ShapeList; both the individual shapes and the list have attributes
att.data a data frame of data from the associated DBF file

Author(s)

Nicholas J. Lewin-Koh, modified by Roger Bivand Roger.Bivand@nhh.no; shapelib by Frank Warmerdam

References

http://gdal.velocet.ca/projects/shapelib/

See Also

plot.Map

Examples

x <- read.shape(system.file("shapes/sids.shp", package="maptools")[1])
length(x$Shapes)
unlist(lapply(x$att.data, class))
str(getinfo.shape(system.file("shapes/fylk-val.shp", package="maptools")[1]))

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