dplR (version 1.6.4)

read.tucson: Read Tucson Format Ring Width File

Description

This function reads in a Tucson (decadal) format file of ring widths (.rwl).

Usage

read.tucson(fname, header = NULL, long = FALSE, encoding = getOption("encoding"), edge.zeros = TRUE)

Arguments

fname

a character vector giving the file name of the rwl file.

header

logical flag indicating whether the file has a header. If NULL then the function will attempt to determine if a header exists.

long

logical flag indicating whether dates in file span 0 CE and therefore use negative numbers. If TRUE only the first 7 characters can be used for series IDs. If FALSE then series IDs can be up to 8 characters.

encoding

the name of the encoding to be used when reading the rwl file. Usually the default value will work, but an rwl file written in a non-default encoding may crash the function. In that case, identifying the encoding and specifying it here should fix the problem. Examples of popular encodings available on many systems are "ASCII", "UTF-8", and "latin1" alias "ISO-8859-1". See the help of file.

edge.zeros

logical flag indicating whether leading or trailing zeros in series will be preserved (when the flag is TRUE, the default) or discarded, i.e. marked as NA (when FALSE).

Value

An object of class c("rwl", "data.frame") with the series in columns and the years as rows. The series IDs are the column names and the years are the row names.

Details

This reads in a standard rwl file as defined according to the standards of the ITRDB at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treeinfo.html. Despite the standards at the ITRDB, this occasionally fails due to formatting problems.

See Also

read.rwl, read.compact, read.tridas, read.fh, write.tucson