tgrline - Read TIGER/Line data

Note   tgrline will be removed in a future version. More recent TIGER/Line data sets are available in shapefile format and can be imported using shaperead.

Syntax

Description

[CL,PR,SR,RR,H,AL,PL] = tgrline(filename) reads a set of 1994 TIGER/Line files which share the same filename, but different extensions. The results are returned in a set of Mapping Toolbox display structures tagged with feature names and containing:

• county boundaries (CL)

• primary roads (PR)

• secondary roads (SR)

• railroads (RR)

• hydrography (H)

• area landmarks (AL)

• point landmarks (PL)

[CL,PR,SR,RR,H,AL,PL] = tgrline(filename,year) reads the TIGER line files in the format from that year. The layout of TIGER/Line files is updated periodically and filename extensions may change from year to year. Valid years are 1990, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004.

[CL,PR,SR,RR,H,AL,PL] = tgrline(filename,year,countyname) uses the string countyname to tag the county data.

Note   For details on locating map data for download over the Internet, see the following documentation at the MathWorks Web site: http://www.mathworks.com/support/tech-notes/2100/2101.html.

Background

The United States Census Bureau distributes TIGER/Line data over the Internet and via CD-ROM or DVD.

TIGER/Line files contain vector map data used to support mapping for the U.S. Census Bureau. TIGER is an acronym for Topographically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing. These files contain data for political boundaries, including states, counties, Indian reservations, and census tracts, as well as roads, railroads, hydrography, and landmarks. In addition to the geographically referenced information, the files also contain data to determine the address of an object. The data covers the United States of America and its territories or administrative units: Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands of the United States, American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianna Islands, the Republic of Palau, the other Pacific entities that were part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia), and the Midway Islands. The most common application of this data is to commercial CD-ROM road atlases.

TIGER/Line is a registered trademark of the United States Census Bureau.

Tips

This function reads only a subset of the data in the TIGER/Line files. For example, the function does not return local roads, zip codes, or census tract numbers.

Data are returned as Mapping Toolbox display structures, which you can then update to geographic data structures. For information about display structure format, see Version 1 Display Structures in the reference page for displaym. The updategeostruct function performs such conversions.

Examples

Read from the data for Washington, D.C.:

[CL,PR,SR,RR,H,AL,PL] = tgrline('TGR11001',1994,'Wash,DC');

See Also

shaperead | updategeostruct

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