Most of the spatial data I work with begins its life as a shapefile. While there are a number of tools available for dealing with shapefiles in R, it is often easier to work in dedicated geographic information system (GIS) software such as ArcMap which is now almost exclusively oriented towards Python-based scripting. With a little help from Alex, I’ve managed to get my head wrapped around Python. The problem is that I now find myself running multiple scripts in multiple languages. When I’m writing code for personal consumption this isn’t really a problem. What usually happens is that I end up running the scripts in the wrong order and I have to start over. When it comes to providing to code to others, however, I am wary of anything that might lead to unintended errors. Consequently, I began looking into ways into which I could better integrate the Python-based scripts I use to work with geographic data with the R-based scripts I use to handle data analysis.

Perhaps the most elegant solution is to use something like RPy. I started down this road while working at home on a MacBook Pro only to have it all fall apart when I got to work where I am on a Windows-based system which isn’t compatible with either rpy or rpy2. As it turns out, the system command in R served as a viable work-around. More specifically, instead of writing a single script in Python using some variant of RPy, I wrote a master script in which I use the system command to call a separate .py file which generates shapefiles that can then be read and analyzed in R. This is basically a modification of a trick I’ve used in the past for organizing .tex files in my dissertation and .do files in Stata. The key difference is that so long as the scripts in questions can executed via the command line, it is relatively easy to use R to organize processes working across multiple platforms. I’d be interested to hear what other solutions people have come up with for dealing with this type of problem. Even if it is an ordinary conversion like pdf to word.