pull.Spat: Extract a single layer/attribute

In tidyterra: 'tidyverse' Methods and 'ggplot2' Helpers for 'terra' Objects

Extract a single layer/attribute

Description

pull() is similar to $ on a data frame. It's mostly useful because it looks a little nicer in pipes and it can optionally name the output.

It is possible to extract the geographic coordinates of a SpatRaster. You need to use pull(.data, x, xy = TRUE). x and y are reserved names on terra, since they refer to the geographic coordinates of the layer.

See Examples and section About layer names on as_tibble.Spat().

Usage

## S3 method for class 'SpatRaster'
pull(.data, var = -1, name = NULL, ...)

## S3 method for class 'SpatVector'
pull(.data, var = -1, name = NULL, ...)

Arguments

.data	A SpatRaster created with terra::rast() or a SpatVector created with terra::vect().
var	A variable specified as: a literal layer/attribute name. a positive integer, giving the position counting from the left. a negative integer, giving the position counting from the right. The default returns the last layer/attribute (on the assumption that's the column you've created most recently). This argument is taken by expression and supports quasiquotation (you can unquote column names and column locations).
name	An optional parameter that specifies the column to be used as names for a named vector. Specified in a similar manner as var.
...	Arguments passed on to as_tibble.Spat()

Value

A vector the same number of cells/geometries as .data.

On SpatRaster objects, note that the default (na.rm = FALSE) would remove empty cells, so you may need to pass (na.rm = FALSE) to .... See terra::as.data.frame().

terra equivalent

terra::values()

Methods

Implementation of the generic dplyr::pull() method. This is done by coercing the ⁠Spat*⁠ object to a tibble first (see as_tibble.Spat) and then using dplyr::pull() method over the tibble.

SpatRaster

When passing option na.rm = TRUE to ..., only cells with a value distinct to NA are extracted. See terra::as.data.frame().

If xy = TRUE option is passed to ..., two columns names x and y (corresponding to the geographic coordinates of each cell) are available in position 1 and 2. Hence, pull(.data, 1) and pull(.data, 1, xy = TRUE) return different result.

SpatVector

When passing geom = "WKT"/geom = "HEX" to ..., the geometry of the SpatVector can be pulled passing var = geometry. Similarly to SpatRaster method, when using geom = "XY" the ⁠x,y⁠ coordinates can be pulled with var = x/var = y. See terra::as.data.frame() options.

See Also

dplyr::pull()

Other dplyr verbs that operate on columns: glimpse.Spat, mutate.Spat, relocate.Spat, rename.Spat, select.Spat

Other dplyr methods: arrange.SpatVector(), bind_cols.SpatVector, bind_rows.SpatVector, count.SpatVector(), distinct.SpatVector(), filter-joins.SpatVector, filter.Spat, glimpse.Spat, group-by.SpatVector, mutate-joins.SpatVector, mutate.Spat, relocate.Spat, rename.Spat, rowwise.SpatVector(), select.Spat, slice.Spat, summarise.SpatVector()

Examples

library(terra)
f <- system.file("extdata/cyl_tile.tif", package = "tidyterra")
r <- rast(f)

# Extract second layer
r |>
  pull(2) |>
  head()

# With xy the first two cols are `x` (longitude) and `y` (latitude)

r |>
  pull(2, xy = TRUE) |>
  head()

# With renaming

r |>
  mutate(cat = cut(cyl_tile_3, c(0, 100, 300))) |>
  pull(cyl_tile_3, name = cat) |>
  head()

tidyterra documentation built on March 11, 2026, 9:08 a.m.