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.
default TRUE --- report type of shapefile and number of shapes
x
a shapehead list as returned by getinfo.shape
...
other arguments passed to print
Value
read.shape() returns either a list of shapes of class ShapeList, or if dbf.data = TRUE a Map object with:
Shapesa list of shapes of class ShapeList; both the individual shapes and the list have attributes
att.dataa data frame of data from the associated DBF file; note that the field names are adjusted to use in R using make.names(), and so will permit the underscore character from R release 1.9.0.
Details
The function calls code from shapelib to read shapefiles, a file format used by ESRI GIS software among others