shapefile: Read or write a shapefile

Description

Reading and writing of "ESRI shapefile" format spatial data. Only the three vector types (points, lines, and polygons) can be stored in shapefiles.

A shapefile should consist of at least four files: .shp (the geometry), .dbf (the attributes), .shx (the index that links the two, and .prj (the coordinate reference system). If the .prj file is missing, a warning is given. If any other file is missing an error occurs (although one could in principle recover the .shx from the .shp file). Additional files are ignored.

Usage

# S4 method for character
shapefile(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE, verbose=FALSE, warnPRJ=TRUE, ...)
# S4 method for Spatial
shapefile(x, filename='', overwrite=FALSE, ...)

Value

Spatial*DataFrame (reading). Nothing is returned when writing a shapefile.

Arguments

x: character (a file name, when reading a shapefile) or Spatial* object (when writing a shapefile)
filename: character. Filename to write a shapefile
overwrite: logical. Overwrite existing shapefile?
verbose: logical. If TRUE, information about the file is printed
warnPRJ: logical. If TRUE, a warning is given if there is no .prj file
stringsAsFactors: logical. If TRUE, strings are converted to factors
...: Additional arguments (none)

Examples

Run this code

filename <- system.file("external/lux.shp", package="raster")
filename
p <- shapefile(filename)

if (FALSE) {
shapefile(p, 'copy.shp')
}

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