saving shapefiles with R that can be re-read as a shapefile

General
4

I'm not totally clear on what format you need to save your spatial data frame in, but the simplest thing to do if you just want to save it disk as a file that R can read back in is to use the native .rds format, which can store any R object.

Here is an example where I read in a .shp file, add a new column, save it to disk, and then read it back in. (As an aside, I'm using the sf package, which I highly recommend for working with spatial data in R instead of sp. But this same pattern would work just as well for an sp object too!)

library(tidyverse)
library(sf)
#> Linking to GEOS 3.6.1, GDAL 2.1.3, PROJ 4.9.3

# read in .shp file to sf object
nc <- read_sf(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package = "sf"))

# add column to sf object
nc_new <- nc %>% 
  mutate(new_data = runif(nrow(nc)))

# save new object as .rds file
write_rds(nc_new, path = file.path(tempdir(), "nc_new.rds"))

# read in saved .rds
nc_saved <- read_rds(file.path(tempdir(), "nc_new.rds"))

# they match!
identical(nc_new, nc_saved)
#> [1] TRUE

Created on 2019-06-08 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)

2 Likes