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.
Arguments
- file
name of file containing coastline data.
- 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.