R: Read Tucson Format Ring Width File

read.tucson {dplR}

R Documentation

Read Tucson Format Ring Width File

Description

This function reads in a Tucson (decadal) format file of ring widths (.rwl).

Usage

read.tucson(fname, header = NULL, long = FALSE,
            encoding = getOption("encoding"), 
            edge.zeros = TRUE, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

`fname`	a `character` vector giving the file name of the rwl file.
`header`	`logical` flag indicating whether the file has a header. If `NULL` then the function will attempt to determine if a header exists.
`long`	`logical` flag indicating whether dates in file span 0 CE and therefore use negative numbers. If `TRUE` only the first 7 characters can be used for series IDs. If `FALSE` then series IDs can be up to 8 characters.
`encoding`	the name of the encoding to be used when reading the rwl file. Usually the default value will work, but an rwl file written in a non-default encoding may crash the function. In that case, identifying the encoding and specifying it here should fix the problem. Examples of popular encodings available on many systems are `"ASCII"`, `"UTF-8"`, and `"latin1"` alias `"ISO-8859-1"`. See the help of `file`.
`edge.zeros`	`logical` flag indicating whether leading or trailing zeros in series will be preserved (when the flag is `TRUE`, the default) or discarded, i.e. marked as `NA` (when `FALSE`).
`verbose`	`logical` flag, print info on data.

Details

This reads in a standard rwl file as defined according to the standards of the ITRDB at https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/treeinfo.txt. Despite the standards at the ITRDB, this occasionally fails due to formatting problems.

Value

An object of class c("rwl", "data.frame") with the series in columns and the years as rows. The series IDs are the column names and the years are the row names.

Author(s)

Andy Bunn. Patched and greatly improved by Mikko Korpela.