The goal of basf is to smooth over some of the peculiarities of the sf package, with a very short list of features.

• plot simple features in a base graphics way that sp did.
• read vector data with a straightforward extent filter

From CRAN in the usual way.

install.packages("basf")

From Github:

#install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("mdsumner/basf")

Use library(basf) instead of library(sf) if you want these features.

There will be a warning when basf starts up because this is what it does.

Registered S3 method overwritten by 'basf':
  method  from
  plot.sf sf  

This example shows the impact of basf on plotting.

library(basf)

## all the stuff is available
x <- read_sf(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))

## all we've changed is the plot command
plot(x)
plot(x[sample(1:nrow(x), 10), ], col = rainbow(10), add = TRUE)
## overplotting works
axis(1); axis(2)
abline(v = -80, h = -34)

Without basf, we would have to do extra format-aware workarounds when setting up the plot. I find this incredibly disruptive, perhaps because I’ve used R and sp for so long - I use plotting every day to verify my work. It makes no sense to me to make things format-specific so I’m kind of mystified as to why it’s gone this way.

library(sf)
x <- read_sf(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))

plot(x[1], reset = FALSE, col = NA, main = "")
plot(x[sample(1:nrow(x), 10), ], col = rainbow(10), add = TRUE)
axis(1); axis(2)
abline(v = -80, h = -34)

This example shows the impact of basf on reading. We would otherwise obtain 32 polygons from this file.

The second optional argument ext can be an extent, either a raw vector xmin,xmax,ymin,ymax as here or a spatial object.

library(basf)
read_ext("../measoshapes/inst/extdata/measo_regions_ll.gpkg", c(100, 120, -80, -10))
Simple feature collection with 8 features and 3 fields
geometry type:  POLYGON
dimension:      XY
bbox:           xmin: 30 ymin: -80 xmax: 170 ymax: -30
geographic CRS: WGS 84

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