[R] R Output and ArcGIS

[Michael Denslow]

Hi Steve,

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Steve Murray <smurray444 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I've been using R on a Mac to process some data for export to ArcMap GIS (which only runs on Windows). ArcMap seems to require tab-delimited data (my data are in 3 columns), so I've been using the sep="\t" argument. However, this resulted in strange end-of-line characters when displayed on a PC. I looked in the write.table help file to find that eol="\r\n" can be used to get around this problem, and it does indeed prevent these unwanted characters from appearing.

How did you look at the output? in Excel?

> However, the data still aren't properly recognised by ArcMap when created on a Mac (the exact same code works fine from a PC). In ArcMap, when I select 'Display XY Data', the X (Longitude) and Y (Latitude) columns aren't available to select. It's as if Arc isn't correctly interpreting the output from R - this is despite me using col.names=TRUE in the write.table command.

I usually use col.names=NA, when I am writing a file to be read by a
spreadsheet. This is also documented in ?write.table.

As Milton pointed out you should also make sure that you are careful
with your column names since R and ArcMap have different rules.

Posting the results of str(YourData) might shed some light as well.

Hope this helps,
Michael


>
> Any light shed on this will be very gratefully received.
>
> Many thanks for your help,
>
> Steve
>
>
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Michael Denslow

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