Intersecting lines and polygons and calculating line length in R?

Question

I have shapefiles of polygons and lines at my disposal. I would like to intersect polygons and lines with R and thus calculate the length of the lines present in each polygon. You can find the data here "https://www.dropbox.com/s/b6x9gk8bzhan7zm/test.rar?dl=0" .I know how to do it on Arcgis but I would like to have a code on R to automate this because I have to do the same procedure for a lot of data. The code I put in place on R :

setwd("D:/folder/test")

library(sp)
library(maptools)
library(rgeos)
library(rgdal)

Poly <- readOGR("grille.shp",layer="grille")
plot(Poly)

line <- readOGR("line.shp",layer="line")
plot(line)

Inter <- gIntersection(line,Poly,byid=TRUE)

allows me to have an intersection but what I would like to know is how to calculate then the length of the lines present in each polygon ?

Answer 1

I would recommend to use the sf package. You should also consider to use a projected CRS, in your case one, that is true to distance.

library("sf")
library("dplyr")

poly = read_sf("grille.shp")
line = read_sf("line.shp")
# intersection
int = st_intersection(line, poly)
# find out about the length of each line segment
int$len = st_length(int)
# use a meaningful id (so far consists only of 0s)
poly$Id = 1:nrow(poly)
# spatial overlay
join = st_join(poly, int)
# use the ID of the polygon for the aggregation
out = group_by(join, Id.x) %>%
  summarize(length = sum(len))
# find out about polygons without line segments 
filter(out, is.na(length))
# you can set the length of the polygons without line intersections to 0 
# if you want
mutate(out, length = ifelse(is.na(length), 0, length))

Of course, you can do the same in sp but sf already began to replace sp. To find out more about how to use sf, look at its vignettes (vignette(package = "sf")) and at our book Geocomputation with R.