R: Read or write a shapefile

shapefile {raster} | R Documentation

## 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. These are simple wrapper functions around readOGR and writeOGR (rgdal package). 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 signature 'character'
    shapefile(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE, verbose=FALSE, warnPRJ=TRUE, ...)

    ## S4 method for signature 'Spatial'
    shapefile(x, filename='', overwrite=FALSE, ...)

### 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 passed to rgdal functions readOGR or writeOGR

### Value

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

### Examples

    if (require(rgdal)) {

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

    ## Not run:
    shapefile(p, 'copy.shp')

    ## End(Not run)
    }

[Package raster version 3.4-13 Index]