CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rspatialrbind
AR Stats
AR Stats

Reputation: 1

spRbind SpatialPolygonDataFrames with different fields

I'm trying to append two SpatialPolygonDataFrames that have different fields. I've been using spRbind and have created unique row ids for each data frame using spChFIDs. But I still get the following error.

Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) : numbers of columns of arguments do not match

An example is block-level shapefile date from NHGIS for the states of Missouri and Illinois. Missouri has 17 fields and Illinois has 18.

Missouri: OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile Source: "../nhgis0030_shapefile_tl2010_290_block_2010", layer: "MO_block_2010" with 343565 features It has 17 fields

Illinois: OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile Source: "../nhgis0030_shapefile_tl2010_170_block_2010", layer: "IL_block_2010" with 451426 features It has 18 fields Integer64 fields read as strings: ALAND10 AWATER10

Upvotes: 0

Views: 423

Answers (1)

Robert Hijmans
Robert Hijmans

Reputation: 47191

You can use the bind method from the raster package for this

As always, first set up some example data (you should have include some in your question):

library(raster)
# example data
p <- shapefile(system.file("external/lux.shp", package="raster"))
p
#class       : SpatialPolygonsDataFrame 
#features    : 12 
#extent      : 5.74414, 6.528252, 49.44781, 50.18162  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
#coord. ref. : +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0 
#variables   : 5
#names       : ID_1,     NAME_1, ID_2,   NAME_2, AREA 
#min values  :    1,   Diekirch,    1, Capellen,   76 
#max values  :    3, Luxembourg,    9,    Wiltz,  312 

p1 <- p[p$NAME_2=='Mersch', ]
p2 <- p[p$NAME_2=='Diekirch', ]
p3 <- p[p$NAME_2=='Remich', ]

# remove all fields for p1
p1 <- as(p1, 'SpatialPolygons')
# remove one field for p3
p3$NAME_1 <- NULL
# add a new field
p3$newfield <- 25

Now we have the example data, use bind to combine the three SpatialPolygon* objects:

x <- bind(p1, p2, p3)

data.frame(x)
#  ID_1   NAME_1 ID_2   NAME_2 AREA newfield
#1   NA     <NA> <NA>     <NA>   NA       NA
#2    1 Diekirch    2 Diekirch  218       NA
#3    2     <NA>    7   Remich  129       25

Upvotes: 2

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