Message-ID: <4B1F45F5.7000608@wildintellect.com>
Date: 2009-12-09T06:38:45Z
From: Alex Mandel
Subject: convert KML file into shape file or CSV file
In-Reply-To: <a835c81e0912081722o4d35b198y25d38ce41d9495a8@mail.gmail.com>
rusers.sh wrote:
> Hi all,
> Does anybody know how to import a KML file in R and them save it as a
> shape or CSV file. Take the following KML file as an example,
> http://www.nature.com/nature/googleearth/avianflu1.kml
> I have tried several extentions of
> ARCGIS,e.g.KML2Shape,KMLCSVConverter,KMLCSVConverter and XToolsPro, but
> unfortunately failed to do that. I didnot find a method to solve it in R.
> If this cannot be done in R, i'd like to see your alternative method to do
> that.
> Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
>
The way to do it in R is with the rgdal library (install.packages("rgdal")
-- psuedo code --
library(rgdal)
readOGR("pathtofile",layer.kml)
writeOGR("pathtooutput",driver="ESRI Shapefile",layer=output.shp)
-- end of fake code example --
but if you have the rgdal library that means you also have GDAL/OGR
installed and could just us the command line on your system:
ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" nameof.shp file.kml
In this particular case, I tried with the file you linked. Turns out
it's not a valid KML file, at least according to OGC standards.
After failing to get any of my GIS tools to read it I checked it using
http://kmlvalidator.com/home.htm
It returns several Errors.
There's a good chance the file still works in Google Earth but nothing
else seems to be able to figure it out.
Alex