Walking the hierarchy

Let's practice accessing slots by exploring the way polygons are stored inside SpatialDataFrame objects. Remember there are two ways to access slots in an S4 object:

[email protected]_name # or...
slot(x, "slot_name")

So, to take a look at the polygons slot of countries_spdf you simply do [email protected]. You can try it, but you'll get a long and not very informative output. Let's look at the high level structure instead.

Try running the following code in the console:

str([email protected], max.level = 2)

Still a pretty long output, but scroll back to the top and take a look. What kind of object is this? It's just a list, but inside its elements are another kind of sp class: Polygons. There are 177 list elements. Any guesses what they might represent?

Let's dig into one of these elements.

Create a new variable called one that contains the 169th element of the list in the polygons slot of countries_spdf. Use double bracket subsetting (i.e. [[...]] to extract this element.
Print one.
Call summary() on one. What slots does this object have?
Call str() on one with max.level = 2.

Exercise

Walking the hierarchy

Instructions