Batch Downloading Zipped Shapefiles with R

September 16, 2013

(This article was first published on theBioBucket*, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Here’s a function I use to download multiple zipped shapefiles from url and load them to the workspace:

URLs <- c("http://gis.tirol.gv.at/ogd/umwelt/wasser/wis_gew_pl.zip",
          "http://gis.tirol.gv.at/ogd/umwelt/wasser/wis_tseepeicher_pl.zip")

url_shp_to_spdf <- function(URL) {

  require(rgdal)

  wd <- getwd()
  td <- tempdir()
  setwd(td)

  temp <- tempfile(fileext = ".zip")
  download.file(URL, temp)
  unzip(temp)

  shp <- dir(tempdir(), "*.shp$")
  lyr <- sub(".shp$", "", shp)
  y <- lapply(X = lyr, FUN = function(x) readOGR(dsn=shp, layer=lyr))
  names(y) <- lyr

  unlink(dir(td))
  setwd(wd)
  return(y)
  }

y <- lapply(URLs, url_shp_to_spdf)
z <- unlist(unlist(y))

# finally use it:
plot(z[[1]])