Dear Nicholas Lewin-Koh and Roger Bivand or Frank Warmerdam, I am using read.dbf from the foreign package within my package vegdata. Unfortunately if you delete some data in the primary program the data in the dbase file is not deleted but the line only gets a flag "IsDeleted". read.dbf ignores this information but the shapelib C code (http://shapelib.maptools.org/.) provides this information as far as I understood (DBFIsRecordDeleted()). Would it be possible to respect this information during import using read.dbf? All the best, Florian Jansen -- Dr. Florian Jansen Geobotany & Nature Conservation Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University Grimmer Str. 88 17487 Greifswald Germany +49 (0)3834 86 4147 http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/jansen.html