identifyDriver: Identify the GDAL driver that can open a dataset

In gdalraster: Bindings to the 'Geospatial Data Abstraction Library' Raster API

Identify the GDAL driver that can open a dataset

Description

identifyDriver() will try to identify the driver that can open the passed file name by invoking the Identify method of each registered GDALDriver in turn. The short name of the first driver that successfully identifies the file name will be returned as a character string. If all drivers fail then NULL is returned. Wrapper of GDALIdentifyDriverEx() in the GDAL C API.

Usage

identifyDriver(
  filename,
  raster = TRUE,
  vector = TRUE,
  allowed_drivers = NULL,
  file_list = NULL
)

Arguments

filename	Character string containing the name of the file to access. This may not refer to a physical file, but instead contain information for the driver on how to access a dataset (e.g., connection string, URL, etc.)
raster	Logical value indicating whether to include raster format drivers in the search, TRUE by default. May be set to FALSE to include only vector drivers.
vector	Logical value indicating whether to include vector format drivers in the search, TRUE by default. May be set to FALSE to include only raster drivers.
allowed_drivers	Optional character vector of driver short names that must be considered. Set to NULL to consider all candidate drivers (the default).
file_list	Optional character vector of filenames, including those that are auxiliary to the main filename (see Note). May contain the input filename but this is not required. Defaults to NULL.

Value

A character string with the short name of the first driver that successfully identifies the input file name, or NULL on failure.

Note

In order to reduce the need for such searches to touch the file system machinery of the operating system, it is possible to give an optional list of files. This is the list of all files at the same level in the file system as the target file, including the target file. The filenames should not include any path components. If the target object does not have filesystem semantics then the file list should be NULL.

At least one of the raster or vector arguments must be TRUE.

See Also

gdal_formats()

Examples

src <- system.file("extdata/ynp_fires_1984_2022.gpkg", package="gdalraster")

identifyDriver(src) |> gdal_formats()

gdalraster documentation built on April 4, 2025, 4:38 a.m.