On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:
This can work with a combination of vsizip (or other) and vsicurl, but the multiple files will have to be in an archive (zip or other). http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/UserDocs/ReadInZip See examples near the bottom of the page for OGR. Keep the zip file name the same as the shapefile/layer name and don't have subdirectories for the simplest case. I am pretty sure this cannot work otherwise for a multifile format.
Neat, but I suspect in practice the underlying code is just downloading the zip and extracting to a temp file, which is about four lines of R code. If the shapefile components aren't zipped up, its just as easy. I'd write a wrapper to do that. Barry