Creating Shapefiles in R

Question

I'm trying to create a shapefile in R that I will later import to either Fusion Table or some other GIS application.

To start,I imported a blank shapefile containing all the census tracts in Canada. I have attached other data (in tabular format) to the shapefile based on the unique ID of the CTs, and I have mapped my results. At the moment, I only need the ones in Vancouver and I would like to export a shapefile that contains only the Vancouver CTs as well as my newly attached attribute data.

Here is my code (some parts omitted due to privacy reasons):

shape <- readShapePoly('C:/TEST/blank_ct.shp') #Load blank shapefile
shape@data = data.frame(shape@data, data2[match(shape@data$CTUID, data2$CTUID),]) #data2 is my created attributes that I'm attaching to blank file
shape1 <-shape[shape$CMAUID == 933,] #selecting the Vancouver CTs

I've seen other examples using this: writePolyShape to create the shapefile. I tried it, and it worked to an extent. It created the .shp, .dbf, and .shx files. I'm missing the .prj file and I'm not sure how to go about creating it. Are there better methods out there for creating shapefiles?

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Use rgdal and writeOGR. rgdal will preserve the projection information

something like

library(rdgal)

shape <- readOGR(dsn = 'C:/TEST', layer = 'blank_ct')
# do your processing
shape@data = data.frame(shape@data, data2[match(shape@data$CTUID, data2$CTUID),]) #data2 is my      created attributes that I'm attaching to blank file
shape1 <-shape[shape$CMAUID == 933,]
writeOGR(shape1, dsn = 'C:/TEST', layer ='newstuff', driver = 'ESRI Shapefile')

Note that the dsn is the folder containing the .shp file, and the layer is the name of the shapefile without the .shp extension. It will read (readOGR) and write (writeOGR) all the component files (.dbf, .shp, .prj etc)