Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am trying to plot a shapefile on top of a raster using the command readOGR. My current code is:
CEZ <- readOGR(".", "Shapefile/CEZ1")
This is followed by the error code
Error in ogrInfo(dsn = dsn, layer = layer, encoding = encoding, use_iconv = use_iconv, : Cannot open data source
I am unsure what this code means - Is it a problem with the shapefile, the command or the way I have structured the path?
The raster package has a handy wrapper function for reading shapefiles. You should be able to do:
library(raster)
CEZ <- shapefile("./Shapefile/CEZ1.shp")
if that's where your shapefile really is. You might get a better error message.
rgdal::readOGR and the raster::shapefile wrapper will read any valid feature geometry. Are you sure that your data is residing in the "Shapefile" subdirectory of your current working directory? You can check using list.files(file.path(getwd(), "Shapefile"), "shp$") if you data is not listed then it is not in the specified directory.
Jul 2, 2020 at 14:14
Error in .local(x, ...) : file.exists(extension(x, ".shp")) is not TRUE from what I have found on the forum, this is usually because the other files are not in the same folder e.g. .shx and .dbf, however I have made sure mine area... really not sure what's going on!
Jul 3, 2020 at 7:26
dsnis the path and thelayerargument is the name of the shapefile without the .shp extension. You are passing a partial path argument to the layer argument where it should just be "CEZ1". If you need to get to a sub-directory in your wd you can use something likefile.path(getwd(), "Shapefile")for the dsn argument. The suggestion by @Spacedman removes these complications.