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.

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.

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