Shapefiles are compound files that store their attribute data in a file with extension *.dbf
. (See the Wikipedia shapefile article for a reference.) The dbf
suffix refers to the dBase file format, which can be read by the function read.dbf()
in the foreign
package.
So, try this:
library(foreign)
df <- read.dbf("tl_2011_01_tabblock.dbf")
## And, more generally, read.dbf("path/to/shapefile/shapefile-name.dbf")