IQSS / dataverse-client-r

R Client for Dataverse Repositories
https://iqss.github.io/dataverse-client-r
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Guidance on downloading and reading multiple files (shp) #132

Open kuriwaki opened 9 months ago

kuriwaki commented 9 months ago

Something to think about:

Shapefiles are a common example of case for the user needing to load multiple files at once. shapefiles come as a set of multiple files like this example:

image

(from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/IU8RQK by @mmukaigawara

In R, we would read this in with sf::st_read("iraq_districts") to refer to the whole set of files that start in "iraqdistricts". But doing this with `dataverse::get*` in one step is not currently possible

Other datasets like VEST precinct data upload a zipped .zip file instead of the components separately.

What should the guidance be? It is probably too complicated to allow get_* to take a vector of filenames. So an alternative is a snippet that downloads multiple files into a tempfile(), and reads from that tempfile?