Perhaps asking on R-sig-geo might help (as well as reading the function help files, scripts found lying around somewhere may be stale ...)?
If readShapePoly() (deprecated - use readShapeSpatial() instead) says that the data are not polygons, then they are not. If you want to fill administrative boundaries polygons, you need polygons, not lines. The source you are using is based on OpenStreetMaps, so more likely to be lines, and as the website says, not authorised. You need to locate an appropriate source of boundary data first for your geographical features of interest. There are very few national mapping agencies that make these data available free (the US led on this, some others are understanding too, slowly). Having done that, use readOGR() in rgdal to read the polygon shapefile into a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame (maybe use ogrInfo() in rgdal to explore the shapefile). Choose readOGR() rather than readShapeSpatial() if the shapefile has a *.prj file specifying its coordinate reference system. If you need NUTS3 entities, try the "france" map data in the maps package. In addition, note that your shapefile is very detailed, and suitable for poster-size output with lots of boundary detail. You may prefer less boundary detail - another search criterion in looking for a source. Eurostat/GISCO provides some boundaries at various spatial "scales", so giving faster but coarser plotting when the 1:10M or 1:20M variants are chosen. Hope this helps, Roger CE.KA wrote: > > Hi Greg > > I downloaded the file "france.shapefiles.zip" > Then i unziped it. > There were 4 files interesting me: > - france_administrative.dbf > - france_administrative.prj > - france_administrative.shp > - france_administrative.shx > How can i do to read the map "france_administrative" with R > > I tried this script that i found on a french web site: > library(maptools) > > library(rgdal) > > library(foreign) > proj.string <- "+init=epsg:27572 +proj=lcc +lat_1=45.90287723937 > > +lat_2=47.69712276063 +lat_0=46.8 +lon_0=2.337229104484 > > +x_0=600000 +y_0=2200000 +units=m +pm=greenwich" > proj.string.geo <- "+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84" > france <- readShapePoly("france_administrative.shp", > proj4string=CRS(proj.string)) > france <- spTransform(france, CRS(proj.string.geo)) > save(france, file="france.rda") > > But there was an error message: > Error in .asSpatialPolygonsShapes(Map$Shapes, IDs, proj4string = > proj4string, : > Not polygon shapes > > Best regards > -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/map-of-a-country-and-its-different-geographical-levels-tp26225645p26240923.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.