Raster Analyis in QGIS - 1 Band Color Table Data

Today I have tried various options for analysing my rasters in QGIS. As said before My objective is to do raster analysis on qgis of rasters representing the same forested area and the different land use types at differing resolutions. I have started doing it through R but have decided that I first would like some kind of output for the data that I can understand.  I started with the 1-band colour table plugin but that crashes qgis every time and requires a reboot of the system after which it crashes the system again.  I have tried to reinstall the plugin but that has not been successful as it has been removed from the repository.  I have therefore had to download the plugin form the website of the creators here and follow the installation instructions.


Running this plugin for a raster creates an *.xml file in the same directory as the raster.  I have opened these without too much success before but upon opening it now, it automatically opened in Xcode... and mostly it makes no sense but there is one pretty interesting thing that I saw...

Now this is exciting because it seems that those are the raster value counts... Starting with one, all the way to 998, the highest value in my raster, with each "cell" representing a value and a count of the times in which that value appears in the raster. Now the question is how can i get that in some useful format to analyse in R or perhaps even write a short plugin for this...


It would appear that the function that collects these data is GetRasterBand or GetStatistics. These can both be called in a python code.