spmaps | remove certain parts of a polygon

[Friedrich Hula]

Hi. I don't know whether I am right here with my question, but I have the following problem:

I want to use spmaps to plot the European Union with both country borders and regional borders (NUTS1 level).

I know the code for doing so. However, the shapefile at country-level (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/...16-01m.shp.zip) contains also the EU's overseas territories and islands (Acores, Guyana etc.). Now when I plot this shapefile in its enirety, the "core" Europe becomes very small (a bit like the Alaska-Hawaii-location problem in US maps).

It is easy to exclude these overseas regions at the disaggregated NUTS1 level, there I can easily identify the overseas territories by there NUTS codes and use

spmap datavar if region != "overseas" using shapefile, id(_ID)

This is however not possible on the country level, so I cannot code sth. like

spmap datavar if region != "overseas" using shapefile, id(_ID) polygon(data(countrylevel_shp) select(keep if region != "overseas"))

I tried erasing some observations in the country-level shapefile by merging it on _X and _Y with the region-level shapefile to identify and flag those parts of the polygon that I don't want to map. It didn't work out -- there was no match.

Do you know how to solve this problem? I really don't know what to do.

Thanks for any advice!

[Scott Merryman]

After some manual manipulation of the country level shapefile and the regional database file:

cd "C:\Users\Scott\Desktop\temp1"
spshape2dta  nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_0, replace
use  nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_0_shp,clear
drop if _X <  2100000
drop if _Y < 0
save,replace

spshape2dta  nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_1, replace
use nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_1.dta,clear
drop if _CX < 2000000
save, replace

spmap using  nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_1_shp, id(_ID) /// 
 ocolor(blue ) os(vthin) ///
 polygon(data(nuts_rg_01m_2016_3035_levl_0_shp) osize(vthin))

[Friedrich Hula]

Wow thank you Scott! That works pretty well.