read.tucson.legacy: Read Tucson Format Ring Width File (Legacy Reader)

In dplR: Dendrochronology Program Library in R

Read Tucson Format Ring Width File (Legacy Reader)

Description

This function reads in a Tucson (decadal) format file of ring widths (.rwl). It is the reader that dplR used through version 1.7.9, kept unchanged for backward compatibility. New code should use read.tucson.

Usage

read.tucson.legacy(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://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/treeinfo.txt. Despite the standards at the ITRDB, this occasionally fails due to formatting problems.

This function was the default Tucson reader in dplR through version 1.7.9. As of 1.8.0 that role belongs to read.tucson, which reads files this one cannot, reports malformed lines rather than guessing at them, and by default returns interior gaps as NA instead of filling them with zero. This function is retained so that existing workflows continue to produce exactly the numbers they always have, and because it honours the encoding argument, which read.tucson does not. Use read.tucson(fname, fill.internal.NA = 0) to get the new reader's parsing with the old reader's treatment of gaps.

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.

See Also

read.tucson, read.rwl, read.compact, read.tridas, read.fh, write.tucson

dplR documentation built on Oct. 1, 2026, 9:07 a.m.