check_geodata: Check and retrieve required geodata files

In ggmapcn: Customizable China and Global Map Visualizations

Check and retrieve required geodata files

Description

Ensures that external geospatial data files required by ggmapcn are available locally. Existing files are reused when overwrite = FALSE; missing files are downloaded from remote mirrors when possible. If all mirrors fail (for example, due to network restrictions), the function fails gracefully by returning NA for the affected files without raising warnings or errors, in line with CRAN policy.

Usage

check_geodata(
  files = NULL,
  overwrite = FALSE,
  quiet = FALSE,
  max_retries = 3,
  mirrors = NULL,
  use_checksum = TRUE,
  checksums = NULL,
  resume = TRUE,
  local_dirs = NULL
)

Arguments

files	Character vector of file names. If NULL, all known files are processed.
overwrite	Logical; if TRUE, forces re-download even when a non-empty file already exists.
quiet	Logical; if TRUE, suppresses progress output and messages.
max_retries	Integer; number of retry attempts per file and mirror.
mirrors	Character vector of base URLs ending with /. If NULL, package defaults are used.
use_checksum	Logical; if TRUE, verifies SHA-256 checksums when available.
checksums	Optional named character vector of SHA-256 digests. If NULL, defaults derived from known_files() are used.
resume	Logical; whether to attempt HTTP range resume for partially downloaded .part files.
local_dirs	Character vector of directories to search prior to any download attempt.

Details

Because CRAN enforces strict limits on package size, several large datasets are hosted externally rather than bundled in the package. check_geodata() locates or retrieves these files using the following priority:

1. user-specified local_dirs

2. the package extdata directory

3. the per-user cache directory via tools::R_user_dir("ggmapcn", "data")

High-level mapping functions such as geom_mapcn() and geom_world() call check_geodata() internally, so most users do not need to invoke it directly. However, running it explicitly can be useful to pre-fetch or verify required files.

On networks that cannot reliably access cdn.jsdelivr.net or raw.githubusercontent.com, downloads may time out and the corresponding entries in the returned vector will be NA. In such cases, users may manually download the required files from the data repository and place them into a directory supplied through local_dirs, the package extdata directory, or the user cache directory so that downloads are skipped.

Note: recent versions of geom_world() use the following world datasets: world_countries.rda, world_coastlines.rda, and world_boundaries.rda. The legacy world.rda file is no longer used.

Value

A character vector of absolute file paths. Any file that cannot be obtained is returned as NA.

Examples

# Ensure that all default datasets are available (downloads only if needed)
check_geodata()

# Datasets used by geom_world()
check_geodata(c(
  "world_countries.rda",
  "world_coastlines.rda",
  "world_boundaries.rda"
))

# China administrative boundaries
check_geodata(c("China_sheng.rda", "China_shi.rda", "China_xian.rda"))

# Reuse files manually placed in the working directory
check_geodata("world_countries.rda", local_dirs = getwd())

ggmapcn documentation built on Nov. 23, 2025, 9:06 a.m.