shapefile function

Read or write a shapefile

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.

## 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 (none)

Returns

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

Examples

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

## Not run:

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