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So I'm mapping out the postal regions of my country and it's an enormous, 5.4million row dataframe. I don't need every single little twist and turn of the boundries, so I was super excited to discover mapshaper.org. Seemed easy enough, I just threw my .shp file into it, and it spit back a file 10% of the size! Excellent!

Nope.. now it doesn't play with readShapeSpatial... Hopefully I won't need to provide the shapefile (i can track it down if that parts really necessary)

Original code, works:

canada.shp <- readShapeSpatial("canada", verbose=TRUE, delete_null_obj=TRUE)

New map, doesn't:

canada.shp <- readShapeSpatial("simplecanada", verbose=TRUE, delete_null_obj=TRUE)
Shapefile type: Polygon, (5), # of Shapes: 1621
Error in `rownames<-`(`*tmp*`, value = c("0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5",  : 
  attempt to set 'rownames' on an object with no dimensions
In addition: Warning message:
In .Map2PolyDF(Map, IDs = IDvar, proj4string = proj4string, force_ring = force_ring,  :
  Null objects with the following indices deleted: 895

traceback() reveals:

4: stop("attempt to set 'rownames' on an object with no dimensions")
    3: `rownames<-`(`*tmp*`, value = c("0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", 
   "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "13", "14", "15", "16", 
   "17", "18", "19", "20", "21", "22", "23", "24", "25", "26", "27", 
   "28", "29", "30", "31", "32", "33", "34", "35", "36", "37", "38", 
   "39", "40", "41", "42", "43", "44", "45", "46", "47", "48", "49", 
   "50", "51", "52", "53", "54", "55", "56", "57", "58", "59", "60", (ETC!!!!)
2: .Map2PolyDF(Map, IDs = IDvar, proj4string = proj4string, force_ring = force_ring, 
       delete_null_obj = delete_null_obj, retrieve_ABS_null = retrieve_ABS_null)
1: readShapePoly("simplecanada", 
       verbose = TRUE, delete_null_obj = TRUE)
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  • 1
    And with readOGR() of the rgdal package?
    – user32309
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 22:33
  • 1
    @mythstified Can you provide a link to your data, in order to reproduce the issue, and investigate a solution? thanks
    – eblondel
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 19:40

2 Answers 2

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I am wondering why he bothered to send the data to an external service at all, while sitting in front of a powerful tool like R?

For simplifying shapes, you can e.g. use gSimplify from rgeos package.

See https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/151941/8202 for correct handling of the output.

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    Better yet, use rmapshaper::ms_simplify to get the same functionality as that website, although it wasn't around when OP posted this question. gSimplify doesn't preserve between-polygon topology, which leaves it with a pretty narrow range of acceptable use cases. And that website is pretty great for getting a sense of how simplifying algorithms work - I'd use it to pick appropriate tolerance values, for sure.
    – obrl_soil
    Commented Feb 19, 2017 at 12:39
-1

Is it possible you are actually reading a point file, not polygon file? In that case, you might try instead:

readShapePoints("simplecanada", verbose=TRUE, delete_null_obj=TRUE)
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