geolocation - R convert zipcode or lat/long to county

Question

I have a list of locations that contains a city, state, zip, latitude and longitude for each location.

I separately have a list of economic indicators at the county level. I've played with the zipcode package, the ggmap package, and several other free geocoding websites including the US Gazeteer files, but can't seem to find a way to match the two pieces.

Are there currently any packages or other sources that do this?

Answer 1

I ended up using the suggestion from JoshO'Brien mentioned above and found here.

I took his code and changed state to county as shown here:

library(sp)
library(maps)
library(maptools)

# The single argument to this function, pointsDF, is a data.frame in which:
#   - column 1 contains the longitude in degrees (negative in the US)
#   - column 2 contains the latitude in degrees

latlong2county <- function(pointsDF) {
    # Prepare SpatialPolygons object with one SpatialPolygon
    # per county
    counties <- map('county', fill=TRUE, col="transparent", plot=FALSE)
    IDs <- sapply(strsplit(counties$names, ":"), function(x) x[1])
    counties_sp <- map2SpatialPolygons(counties, IDs=IDs,
                     proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))

    # Convert pointsDF to a SpatialPoints object 
    pointsSP <- SpatialPoints(pointsDF, 
                    proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))

    # Use 'over' to get _indices_ of the Polygons object containing each point 
    indices <- over(pointsSP, counties_sp)

    # Return the county names of the Polygons object containing each point
    countyNames <- sapply(counties_sp@polygons, function(x) x@ID)
    countyNames[indices]
}

# Test the function using points in Wisconsin and Oregon.
testPoints <- data.frame(x = c(-90, -120), y = c(44, 44))

latlong2county(testPoints)
[1] "wisconsin,juneau" "oregon,crook" # IT WORKS