In this recipe, we will learn how to read and write geographic data in the form of shapefiles (.shp
), using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software created by ESRI and some other similar software.
We are going to use the maptools
package for this recipe. So, let's install and load it first:
install.packages("maptools") library(maptools)
We are going to read an example shapefile provided with the maptools
package and plot it:
sfdata <- readShapeSpatial(system.file("shapes/sids.shp", package="maptools")[1], proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat")) plot(sfdata, col="orange", border="white", axes=TRUE)
To write out the data as another shapefile, we can do:
writeSpatialShape(sfdata,"xxpoly")