R help - Jul 2004 - Mapinfo mid and mif files

Hi ,

	Has anyone any experience of converting Mapinfo mid and mif
files into a format that can be used with the R spatial packages. 
Thanks.

yours sincerely
Andrew McCulloch
Department of Urban Studies
University of Glasgow
G12 8RS

Not sure if it will work straight with .mid or .mif files, but it works 
for me on .tab files, which were
supposed to be read with the Excel map tool package and beleive confro 
to the MapInfo format.

I asked Roger Bivand at the recent useR!2004 meeting and he made several 
suggestions. Following the
leads he gave me, I found a small program (ogr2ogr) which translates my 
.tab files into .shp files,
which I can then read into R. The MapInfo format is explicitly supported.

I use Debian Linux (sarge), and ogr2ogr  is part of the package 
gdal-bin. A batch
file like

for i in *.tab ; do
ogr2ogr ${i%.*}.shp $i ;
done

converted a bunch of files in a snap. Hope it may be of help to you.

ft.

-- 
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