NA values in dbf when exporting shapefile from R with writeOGR?

Question

I´m writing an esri shapefile from R (2.14.1) on windows, using writeOGR in the rgdal package, in the resulting dbf file, NA values in the spatialpointdataframe (in numeric columns) are not translated to null values but to 0, and sometime the whole column results in 0 values.

I´ve seen this thread, but nothing more recent, can this be resolved in other ways, than converting NAs to a known value before and then back again after writing the .shp?

http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/GRASS-stats-Re-R-sig-Geo-writing-shapefiles-DBF-files-when-input-data-contains-NA-td4049981.html

# Example
require(sp)
require(rgdal)

# example dataframe
x <- data.frame(ID = 1:10, Lon = seq (-85,-76,1), Lat = seq(-9, 0, 1), Data=c(1:5, NA, NA, 7, 9, 10))

#create spatialpointsdataframe
coordinates(x) <- c("Lon", "Lat")
proj4string(x) <- CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84")

#write to esri shapefile
writeOGR(x, dsn=getwd(), layer="example", driver="ESRI Shapefile")

resulting dbf table:

Answer 1

You could transform the NAs to another value, such as -9999, but unfortunately shapefiles do not support null values (they're built on DBF IV) - by default null numeric values are set to zero, and null strings become zero length strings.

Depending on what you want to do with the file afterwards, I'd look at exporting to a format such as Spatiallite, which does support null values.

Answer 2

I don't have a copy of Arc* on hand to test this but I get a different sort of result - it seems that writeOGR DOES preserve NAs? Carrying on the code from @CCID above:

# have a look at the dbf file
xf <- read.dbf("example.dbf")
xf

Gives:

   ID Data
1   1    1
...
5   5    5
6   6   NA
7   7   NA
...

In QGIS the attribute table also shows NAs:

Perhaps this is only an issue in ArcGIS?