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 class 'character'
shapefile(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE, verbose=FALSE, warnPRJ=TRUE, ...)

# S4 method for class '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)

Value

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

Examples

filename <- system.file("external/lux.shp", package="raster")
filename
#> [1] "/Users/runner/work/_temp/Library/raster/external/lux.shp"
p <- shapefile(filename)

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