Read a coastline File — read.coastline • oce

Read a coastline file in R, Splus, mapgen, shapefile, or openstreetmap format. The S and R formats are identical, and consist of two columns, lon and lat, with land-jump segments separated by lines with two NAs. The MapGen format is of the form

 # -b -16.179081 28.553943
-16.244793 28.563330

BUG: the 'arc/info ungenerate' format is not yet understood.

Usage

read.coastline(
  file,
  type = c("R", "S", "mapgen", "shapefile", "openstreetmap"),
  encoding = "latin1",
  monitor = FALSE,
  debug = getOption("oceDebug"),
  processingLog
)

Arguments

file: name of file containing coastline data. If this is a shapefile, then the other parameters (except debug) are ignored, and the results of a call to read.coastline.shapefile() are returned.
type: type of file, one of "R", "S", "mapgen", "shapefile" or "openstreetmap".
encoding: a character value that indicates the encoding to be used for this data file, if it is textual. The default value for most functions is "latin1", which seems to be suitable for files containing text written in English and French.
monitor: print a dot for every coastline segment read (ignored except for reading "shapefile" type)
debug: set to TRUE to print information about the header, etc.
processingLog: if provided, the action item to be stored in the log. (Typically only provided for internal calls; the default that it provides is better for normal calls by a user.)

Value

a coastline object.

Author

Dan Kelley