Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

countryatlas 2.0.0

A major release that wires countryatlas into the database-rendering world via ‘ggsql’, widens the map vocabulary, and fixes several correctness issues found by auditing 1.0.0. The version is bumped to 2.0.0 because the bug fixes change the output of world_map() (quantile binning), bubble_map() / flow_map() (de-duplicated symbols), geom_country_labels() (label placement) and convert_country() (override-only entities) — code that depended on the old behaviour may see different maps or values.

New: database-side rendering with ggsql

• as_ggsql_source() exports a curated, ISO-reconciled, WDI-joined table (with sf geometry WKB-encoded) as a ggsql source — a DuckDB connection, a Parquet file, or a nanoarrow stream. countryatlas does the reconciliation ggsql’s static bundled world can’t; ggsql does the database push-down and Vega-Lite output countryatlas doesn’t.
• world_query() emits a ggsql spatial query (VISUALISE … DRAW spatial PROJECT TO … SCALE … LABEL …) — a dependency-free string builder.
• interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") registers the data and renders the map in DuckDB, returning a Vega-Lite widget.
• ggsql, duckdb, DBI and nanoarrow are optional Suggests. See the new countryatlas and ggsql vignette.

New: maps, projections and helpers

• globe_map() — an orthographic globe choropleth, with backend = "sf" (smoothest limb) or backend = "polygon" (needs only maps + mapproj).
• spin_globe() — a rotating-globe animated GIF (one globe_map() frame per central longitude, assembled with gifski or magick).
• facet_map() — small-multiple choropleths (the static counterpart to animate_world()).
• wdj_crs() gains eight projections (mercator, winkel_tripel, eckert4, gall_peters, orthographic, azimuthal_equal_area, north_polar, south_polar); world_map() / world_geometry() accept them all.
• locate_country() — point-in-polygon lookup tagging lon/lat with iso3c.
• repair_country_names() — the “act on it” companion to check_country_match(): auto-applies confident string-distance fixes.
• country_join_all() — reduce-join many messy country tables on the ISO spine.
• growth_rate(), index_to(), share_of_world() — panel analysis helpers.
• country_overrides() — preferred name for wdj_overrides() (kept as an alias) after the rename to countryatlas.
• country_groups_tbl gains Mercosur, GCC, Nordic and Visegrad.
• country_borders() — a tidy adjacency edge list built from polygon topology (sf::st_touches()), with neighbors() for a vectorised per-country lookup.
• distance_between() — great-circle (haversine) distance between two countries’ centroids; needs neither sf nor the network.
• dorling_map() — the Dorling cartogram promoted to a first-class verb, with k/itermax tuning; cartogram_map() itself gains ... passthrough to the underlying cartogram::cartogram_*() call.

New: historical entities, inequality and spatial statistics

• historical_codes — a curated, dated crosswalk of dissolved entities (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Netherlands Antilles, North/South Yemen, pre-2011 Sudan, United Arab Republic, Tanganyika/Zanzibar, North/South Vietnam, Serbia and Montenegro) to their successor states, with retired ISO codes where they existed. Kosovo is included among the Yugoslav successors on a territory basis (documented).
• dissolve_country() — resolve a mixed vector of historical and modern names to successor iso3c rows (one-to-many, dated); modern names pass through as single rows, so a whole messy column pipes in unchanged.
• check_country_match() gains a historical column. It flags dissolved entities even when countrycode “matches” them — the headline case is "USSR", which countrycode silently resolves to Russia’s RUS, so Soviet-era data becomes Russian data with no warning.
• correlate_indicators() — pairwise indicator correlations on the spine (pearson/spearman, pairwise-complete, per-pair n), tidy long output.
• beta_convergence() / sigma_convergence() — the two standard convergence diagnostics: the growth-on-initial-level regression (with implied convergence speed and half-life) and per-year cross-country dispersion.
• gini() and theil() — inequality across countries, population-weightable; theil() decomposes exactly into between/within components when a grouping (continent, income) is supplied.
• lag_by_country() / diff_by_country() — panel lag and difference grouped by iso3c and ordered by year, completing the panel toolkit around growth_rate() / index_to() / complete_years().
• morans_i() — global Moran’s I with a permutation pseudo-p-value, computed on the row-standardised country_borders() adjacency. No spdep dependency: the weights come from the package’s own curated topology.
• spike_map() — triangular spikes at country centroids (height ∝ value), the overplotting-resistant cousin of bubble_map(); needs only maps.
• convert_country() accepts to = "name_<lang>" ("name_fr", "name_es", "name_zh", …) for localized country names via countrycode’s CLDR tables.
• world_map(style = "binned") legends now show SI-formatted breaks (4M, not 4e+06) when scales is installed; the continuous scale uses the same formatter.

Bug fixes

• bivariate_map() errored on every call (“the condition has length > 1”, pre-dating 2.0.0). The two fill columns were injected into biscale::bi_class() with !!rlang::sym(), but bi_class() reads them with as.character(substitute(...)) rather than tidy eval, so the injection deparsed into a multi-element vector inside biscale. The happy path is now covered by a test (the old one only checked that the function errors cleanly when sf is absent).
• as_ggsql_source() and interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") errored on any sf input – the whole point of the ggsql bridge. sf::st_as_binary() returns a classed WKB object, which tibble rejects (“all columns must be vectors”); the geometry column is now the plain list of raw vectors that nanoarrow encodes as binary and DBI writes as a BLOB.
• projection = "winkel_tripel" errored on every render – one of the eight projections this release adds. The CRS built fine and the geometry projected fine, but ggplot2::coord_sf()’s graticule collapses to a degenerate single-point segment under PROJ’s Winkel Tripel, which GEOS rejects (“point array must contain 0 or >1 elements”). The graticule is now skipped for that projection only; [theme_world_map()] blanks panel.grid anyway, so nothing visible changes. All 13 projections are now covered by a full-render test.
• world_geometry("coastline", geometry = "sf") errored with a GEOS TopologyException in every projection except "plate_carree": a couple of Natural Earth rings are self-intersecting and sf::st_union() (unlike the spatial predicates) refuses them. The geometry is repaired before the union.
• world_geometry(region = c(xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax)) – and world_data() / attach_geometry() with a bounding-box region – errored on the sf backend (“Loop 0 is not valid”), because sf::st_crop() runs under the strict S2 engine on unprojected geometry. It now clips with the GEOS planar predicate, as country_borders() / locate_country() already did.
• convert_country()’s warn argument was documented but silently ignored (every internal countrycode() call is wrapped in suppressWarnings(), because countrycode also warns on intermediate hops that convert_country() goes on to recover). It now reports inputs that match no country, like standardize_country() does. A recognised country whose destination value is genuinely missing still returns NA quietly.
• world_map() / globe_map()’s na_label was accepted and silently ignored. The "quantile", "jenks" and "categorical" legends now label their missing-data key with it (the continuous and binned colourbars have no NA key to name, which the documentation now says).
• Kosovo’s XKX resolves for country and flag from from = "iso3c", not just from its name. It has no row at all in countrycode::codelist, so everything derived from the code was NA – which surfaced as country_borders() / neighbors() returning NA names for Kosovo’s four land borders, locate_country(add = "country") returning NA for points inside it, and standardize_country(add = c("country", "flag")) doing the same. The curated fallback table now carries the name and flag too.
• per_capita() without an explicit pop column died with an opaque vctrs error (“Can’t subset columns that don’t exist: .wdj_pop”) when the World Bank population fetch failed or timed out – fetch_wdi() deliberately degrades to a keys-only tibble in that case. It now reports the failed fetch and points at the pop argument.
• theil() returns NA shares (not NaN) for a perfectly equal distribution, where the total is 0 and the shares are undefined – matching how gini() and share_of_world() treat a zero denominator.
• country_join() / country_join_all() no longer cross-join rows whose iso3c is NA: unmatched countries used to collapse to a single NA key and fan out into a Cartesian product. The joins now pass na_matches = "never" (#4).
• country_join_all() validates the length of origin (must be 1 or one per table) instead of failing with a cryptic “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed” error (#16).
• join_world()’s auto-detection (detect_country_col()) honours the candidate priority order instead of picking the first column by data-frame position, so a region column no longer shadows a real country column (#6).
• standardize_country(add = ...) accepts any raw countrycode destination (e.g. "iso3n") again instead of erroring with “subscript out of bounds” (#5).
• standardize_country(origin = "iso3c") now validates codes: strings that are not real ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes become NA (and are flagged by warn) rather than passing through uppercased and unchecked (#12).
• country_data(latest = TRUE) / world_data(latest = TRUE) for a single year now returns each country’s most recent non-NA value: the fetch window is widened so an earlier observation can actually be found (#7).
• fetch_wdi() keeps iso2c / country for a country that appears only in a non-first indicator (they are coalesced across indicators) instead of leaving them NA (#8).
• world_map() / globe_map() with style = "quantile" / "jenks" no longer error on a constant, single-country, or all-NA value column; degenerate breaks now fall back to a single bin (#9).
• flow_map() returns the base map (instead of erroring) when no origin-destination pair resolves to a centroid (#10).
• aggregate_regions(fun = "min"/"max") returns NA for an all-NA group instead of Inf / -Inf (#11).
• share_of_world() returns NA (not NaN/Inf) when the (per-year) total is zero or non-finite (#13).
• gini() returns NA with a warning for negative input rather than a value outside the documented [0, 1] range (#14).
• spike_map() no longer produces NaN spike coordinates when every height is zero (#15).
• world_query() honours transform even when palette = NULL, emitting a standalone SCALE fill VIA <transform> clause (#17).
• world_map(style = "quantile"/"jenks") computed breaks over polygon vertices, so a country’s geometric complexity biased the quantiles and the bins held unequal numbers of countries. Breaks are now computed on one value per country.
• bubble_map(backend = "sf") placed bubbles in projected metres on a degrees base map (off the map). The base map and bubbles now share one projected CRS via coord_sf().
• Polygon centroids returned more than one row for ten iso3c codes (overrides map several names — Azores/Madeira → PRT — to one code), fanning out joins in bubble_map() / flow_map(). Centroids are now one antimeridian-safe row per country (the largest piece).
• geom_country_labels() placed labels at the bounding-box midpoint over all of a country’s pieces, so the US / Fiji / NZ labels drifted into the wrong ocean. Labels now sit on each country’s largest piece.
• projection = "plate_carree" built an incoherent PROJ string (+proj=longlat … +units=m); it is now true equirectangular (+proj=eqc).
• convert_country() only applied wdj_overrides() for to = "iso3c", so override-only entities (e.g. “Canary Islands”, “Azores”, “Bonaire”) returned NA for every other destination (continent, region, iso2c, flag, currency, country name, …). It now resolves the override-corrected iso3c first and derives every other destination from that.
• Kosovo’s XKX needed extra care: it has no row at all in countrycode::codelist, so deriving destinations purely via the iso3c round-trip above is NA for everything — which would have regressed flag/region/country, since 1.0.0 already resolved those via direct name matching (verified against the actual 1.0.0 code). convert_country() now recovers from the original name when the iso3c round-trip comes back empty, and fills iso2c/continent (which neither path classifies) from the same curated fallback standardize_country() uses. Net effect versus 1.0.0: zero regressions, plus newly-working continent/iso2c for Kosovo — which also fixes locate_country(..., add = "continent") for points inside it.
• interactive_map(..., tooltip = ) was accepted but silently ignored by every engine (pre-dating 2.0.0). The "ggiraph" and "leaflet" engines now use the supplied tooltip column, defaulting to fill as before when omitted.
• world_data(overrides = ) (and attach_geometry(overrides = )) accepted a custom name -> iso3c override set but silently ignored it (pre-dating 2.0.0) – the geometry backend always matched with the default wdj_overrides(). The override set now flows through to both the polygon and sf matchers, so a custom mapping actually changes which polygons a country claims.
• repair_country_names() no longer records a no-op “repair” when a dissolved entity’s own name (e.g. “Yugoslavia”, which exists in the codelist but has no ISO code) comes back as its closest suggestion; dissolve_country() is the right tool there and is what the report now points to.
• A mistyped column name is now reported by countryatlas rather than leaking out of ggplot2 as a bare “object ‘x’ not found” from inside a layer, or out of vctrs as a subscript error. world_map(), globe_map(), facet_map(), tile_map(), bubble_map() (both size and color), spike_map(), flow_map() (from, to and weight), interactive_map() (fill and tooltip) and morans_i() all validate up front, matching the message per_capita() / rank_countries() / bivariate_map() already gave. morans_i() in particular used to blame the geometry (“not enough bordering countries with data”) for a column that simply wasn’t there.
• audit_coverage(indicator = ) silently reported n_missing = 0 and na_rate = NaN for a column name that isn’t in data; it now errors.
• world_map() / globe_map() errored (“‘length = 2’ in coercion to ‘logical(1)’”) when na_label was longer than one element. The first element is used to label the single NA key, and a NULL / NA label still leaves the default formatter alone.
• per_capita() sent start = Inf to the World Bank when data had a year column that was entirely NA; it now falls back to last year, as it already did for a frame with no year column at all. Its degraded-fetch guard also covers the join keys now, so a partial population fetch produces the actionable “pass a population column” error rather than a raw vctrs subscript error.
• theil() returned NaN when every weight was zero; it now returns NA, matching gini().
• world_map() / globe_map() with style = "categorical" and a numeric fill column let ggplot2 raise “Continuous value supplied to a discrete scale” at build time, naming neither the column nor the style. They now error at the call, name the column, and point at "quantile" / "jenks" / "binned".
• bivariate_map() no longer leaks biscale’s “var has missing values, omitted in finding classes” warning, which fired on essentially every call because real indicators always have gaps (the classes were valid either way). Any other biscale warning still passes through.
• A region given as lowercase iso3c codes silently lost countries. Falling through to name matching resolved some codes by accident (countrycode’s country-name regex is case-insensitive, so "usa" matched) but not others ("can" did not), so region = c("usa", "can") subset to the USA alone. Codes are now recognised in any case, matching what standardize_country(origin = "iso3c") already accepted; an all-uppercase unknown code is still taken at face value rather than reinterpreted as a country name.
• country_codes() silently dropped a column name it did not recognise, so a typo returned a table quietly missing that column; it now errors and lists the available shortcuts.
• Every sf-backed call printed three or more lines of sf internals to the console – "Spherical geometry (s2) switched off", st_intersection’s "although coordinates are longitude/latitude ... assumes that they are planar", and the matching "switched on". The source was sf::st_break_antimeridian(), which toggles the s2 engine and runs an intersection internally, and which sits on the path of every sf call: a plain attach_geometry(geometry = "sf") emitted them, as did world_map(), world_geometry(), country_borders(), neighbors(), morans_i(), locate_country() and simplify_geometry(). It is now wrapped in the same quietly_sf() helper the other sf calls already used, so those paths are silent. (The notices bypass R’s condition system, so suppressMessages() could not have caught them.)
• cartogram_map() / dorling_map() never validated their weight or fill column, the one place the rest of the package’s existence checks were missed. A bad weight reached cartogram as "missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed" (or, for the Dorling variant, a warning about max() and then a wrong picture), and a bad fill was not caught at all.
• index_to() likewise never checked its value column, so a typo produced a dplyr error from inside mutate(); base_year and to are validated too.
• Scalar arguments are validated, so a typo or an NA names the argument instead of surfacing as "missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed", classInt’s "n less than 2", or a PROJ complaint about lat_0. Covers n_bins (world_map() / globe_map(), on the binned path as well as the quantile/jenks one), lon/lat/recenter/lat0 (globe_map() on both backends – the polygon one goes to coord_map() and previously accepted a nonsense orientation silently), n (flow_map()), max_height / width / alpha (spike_map()), max_size / alpha (bubble_map()), keep (simplify_geometry()), threshold (repair_country_names()), n_perm (morans_i()), and n_frames / fps / width / height (spin_globe()).
• Two of those scalar arguments were not merely reported badly – they drew the wrong thing in silence. A negative max_height drew spike_map()’s spikes upside down, and globe_map(lat = ) beyond +/-90 built a CRS PROJ rejects, which only surfaced later as coord_sf()’s "crs not found: is it missing?".
• geom_country_labels(repel = TRUE) silently drew plain labels when ggrepel was not installed – the one degraded optional backend the package did not announce, where classInt, gganimate and rmapshaper all report theirs. It now says so once per session (the argument defaults to TRUE, so reporting on every call would be noise), and stays quiet when repel = FALSE was asked for.
• The number of bins no longer depends on whether classInt is installed. For a fractional n_bins, classInt truncated internally while the base-quantile fallback passed the fraction to seq(length.out = ) and produced one break more, so the same call binned differently in different environments. n_bins is now truncated to a whole number of bins before either backend sees it.
• simplify_geometry(keep = 0) errored under rmapshaper but was silently accepted by the sf::st_simplify() fallback, so the same call behaved differently depending on which optional package the caller had installed. A proportion of zero keeps no vertices, and both paths now reject it.
• Count arguments are bounded above as well as below. The scalar checks required a finite number, but several call sites then coerce with as.integer(), which returns NA past 2^31-1 – so n_perm = 1e10 or n_bins = 1e10 produced “NAs introduced by coercion” or, worse, “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”. n_bins, n (flow_map(), lag_by_country(), diff_by_country()), n_perm and n_frames now name the range. morans_i() also dropped a max(0L, ...) clamp that the validation had made unreachable.
• lag_by_country() / diff_by_country() clamped n <= 0 up to 1, so a lag of 0 quietly returned a lag of 1; it now errors.
• complete_years(value = ) silently ignored a column name that wasn’t in data under the default method = "none", while erroring from all_of() for "locf" / "linear"; it now errors consistently.
• interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") now gates on ggsql >= 0.4.1 rather than mere presence. DRAW spatial – the clause world_query() emits – arrived in the ggsql engine at 0.4.0, while the ggsql R package is still 0.3.3, which accepted the call and then failed inside its own SQL front end on a clause it did not know. The gate now refuses with an actionable message instead. ?world_query records that the clause has shipped in the engine but not yet in the R bindings, and that PROJECT TO additionally needs a spatial backend (for DuckDB, its spatial extension); world_query() itself remains a dependency-free string builder.
• R CMD check no longer writes to the checking user’s persistent cache. The \donttest{} examples fetch from the World Bank, so the memoised on-disk cache was being populated under tools::R_user_dir() during a check; under check it now lives in the session temp directory instead. Normal use is unchanged, and options(countryatlas.cache_dir = ) still overrides both. ?clear_wdi_cache now documents where the cache lives and how to disable it.
• An unmatched country in your data could be drawn as a real country. dplyr joins default to na_matches = "na", so an NA ISO code matched another NA ISO code – and Natural Earth carries Somaliland as a polygon with no ISO code. Any row whose country failed to resolve therefore joined onto Somaliland’s geometry and was plotted there; with two or more unmatched rows the join also fanned out many-to-many, duplicating that polygon once per row so the visible fill was whichever happened to be drawn last. Affected attach_geometry(geometry = "sf") (and so join_world() and world_map() downstream of it) and bubble_map(backend = "sf"). All country-keyed joins in the package now pass na_matches = "never", which country_join() and country_join_all() already did; the keyless polygon is still drawn, now correctly as a no-data feature. A test asserts the invariant across the whole namespace so a new join cannot reintroduce it.
• world_query() emitted a silently malformed query for any argument that was not a single string. sprintf() vectorises, so projection = c("a", "b") produced two PROJECT TO clauses, source = character(0) deleted the FROM line entirely, and title = NA became the literal text 'NA' – each of which surfaced only later, as a parse error inside ggsql’s SQL front end. world_query() and as_ggsql_source() now validate their string arguments up front and name the offending one. NULL still omits an optional clause, and an empty title is still allowed.
• as_ggsql_source(format = "parquet") built its COPY ... TO '<path>' statement by string interpolation, so a path containing an apostrophe – legal in a filename – closed the SQL literal early and broke the statement. The path is now quoted with DBI::dbQuoteString(), matching the dbQuoteIdentifier() treatment the table name already had.
• suffix = character(0) made the whole computation vanish. suffix is paste0()-ed onto the value column’s name, and dplyr’s "{character(0)}" := is a silent no-op – so growth_rate(x, g, suffix = character(0)) returned x unchanged, with no growth column and no error. suffix = NA produced a column named gNA, and suffix = "" overwrote the source column in place. per_capita(), growth_rate(), index_to(), share_of_world(), lag_by_country() and diff_by_country() now require a single non-empty string (lag_by_country()/diff_by_country() still accept NULL for the default suffix).
• Several arguments produced an error that named nothing rather than the argument at fault:
  • convert_country(to = c("country", "continent")) – a plausible attempt at two destinations – raised “the condition has length > 1”, and a zero-length to or from raised “argument is of length zero”.
  • origin did the same across every function that resolves country names. It is now validated once in the shared internal, so standardize_country(), country_join(), country_join_all(), join_world(), flow_map(), neighbors(), distance_between(), in_group(), repair_country_names() and check_country_match() are all covered.
  • attach_geometry(by = character(0)) raised “argument is of length zero”.
  • aggregate_regions(by = character(0)) raised nothing at all: it grouped by no columns and silently collapsed the world into a single row. by remains documented as plural, so multiple grouping columns still work.
• Logical arguments are validated too, closing the same gap in two forms. The borders argument of world_map() and globe_map() fed a bare if (), so a bad value raised one of four opaque base R errors (“missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”, “argument is of length zero”, “the condition has length > 1”, “argument is not interpretable as logical”) – none naming borders. Elsewhere the value went through isTRUE(), which never errors but silently turns anything that is not TRUE into FALSE, so the caller got the opposite of what they asked: rank_countries(x, v, desc = "yes") ranked ascending, putting the lowest value at rank 1, and gini(x, na.rm = "yes") kept the NAs and returned NA. All 23 logical arguments across the package now require TRUE or FALSE and name themselves when they do not get it.
• gini() and theil() returned a wrong number for a wrong-length weights vector. Both recycled it with rep_len(), which accepts any length silently, so gini(1:10, weights = c(1, 2)) returned 0.2902 – computed from an alternating 1,2 pattern – where the correctly-weighted answer is 0.3. Someone weighting by population and mistakenly passing a vector of the wrong length got a plausible figure and no indication anything was wrong. weights (and theil()’s groups) must now be length 1 or the length of x, and weights must be numeric. complete_years() likewise rejects a years vector that is non-numeric, empty, or contains NA, all of which it previously coerced to NA behind base R’s warning.
• Omitting a required argument now names it. Every affected function resolved its column argument with rlang::as_name(), which raises argument "x" is missing, with no default for a missing value – naming rlang’s own parameter, and none of these functions has an argument called x. world_map(), tile_map(), facet_map(), spike_map(), bubble_map(), globe_map(), interactive_map(), rank_countries(), growth_rate(), per_capita(), aggregate_regions(), index_to(), share_of_world(), lag_by_country(), diff_by_country(), beta_convergence(), sigma_convergence(), morans_i(), world_query(), country_join(), bivariate_map(), cartogram_map() and flow_map() now report e.g. `fill` is required. Optional tidy-eval arguments are unaffected.
• distance_between() paired the wrong countries when a and b had mismatched lengths. It combined them through vectorised arithmetic, so R’s recycling applied: 2 countries against 3 returned a[1]-b[1], a[2]-b[2] and a[1]-b[3], behind only base R’s “longer object length is not a multiple” warning, and 2 against 4 recycled cleanly with no warning at all. Equal lengths, or a length-1 side for one-against-many, are now required – the same rule locate_country() has always enforced for lon/lat.
• Three documented contracts did not match their code: ?locate_country said lon/lat were “recycled together” when the function has always required equal lengths, and ?gini / ?theil promised that weights was “recycled against x the usual R way”, which is precisely the behaviour removed above. All three now describe what the functions do. locate_country()’s length error also read “or an points sf object”.
• Offline safety is now covered by tests rather than assumed. Checks run \donttest{} examples and rebuild vignettes, and CRAN policy does not allow either to fail for want of a network connection. world_data() and country_data() degrade a failed fetch to a warning and a metadata-only frame, and wdi_search() reads WDI’s bundled indicator list rather than the API; all three are now asserted, so a change that made any of them require a connection would break the suite.
• An unwritable cache directory silently cost you your data. memoise::cache_filesystem() does not validate the directory it is given: it constructs successfully and only fails when something is written, which happens deep inside the fetch. So with a read-only or otherwise unusable cache location, country_data(cache = TRUE) reported Could not fetch indicator "..." from the World Bank API and returned the country spine with every indicator NA – blaming the API for a local permission problem, while the same call with cache = FALSE returned the data perfectly. (The tryCatch() that was meant to fall back never fired, because constructing the cache never errored.) The directory is now checked before use, with a fallback to session-only caching and a one-time message naming the real cause.
• Projected maps failed outright under options(OutDec = ",") – the ordinary setting in comma-decimal locales. The PROJ strings are built by pasting numbers, so recenter = 48.9 became +lon_0=48,9, which PROJ rejects; the invalid CRS then surfaced as sf’s opaque “crs not found: is it missing?”. Every number destined for a machine-readable string is now formatted with an explicit decimal mark.
• Two more of the same kind, triggered by options(scipen = -10), which formats a double in scientific notation: sf::st_crs(4326) became EPSG:4.326e+03 and yielded an NA CRS (surfacing later as st_crs(x) == st_crs(y) is not TRUE from locate_country()), and Natural Earth’s scale 110 became 1.1e+02, so world_geometry(geometry = "sf") failed with 'countries1.1e+02' is not an exported object. Every EPSG code and Natural Earth scale is now an integer literal, which scipen does not affect.
• simplify_geometry() and world_geometry("graticule") are insulated from two upstream bugs of the same family, both reproducible without this package: rmapshaper serialises keep for V8, which rejects the 0,1 that options(OutDec = ",") produces, and sf::st_graticule() overflows the node stack under options(scipen = -10). Both calls now run with those two options normalised, and the caller’s settings are restored immediately afterwards.
• rank_countries() silently ranked within groups when handed a grouped frame. Its mutate() honoured the caller’s group_by(), so the same data ranked 4, 1, 3, 2 ungrouped and 2, 1, 2, 1 after an incidental group_by(region) upstream in the pipe – with within = NULL in both cases, which documents a global ranking. rank, percentile and z_score were all affected. within is now the only thing that sets the ranking scope, matching every other function here, which imposes its own grouping rather than inheriting the caller’s. A test asserts that a grouped input changes no answer, and that nothing leaks grouping into its return value.
• A non-numeric value column now errors by name instead of producing nonsense. A factor column is easy to acquire – read.csv() on a column with one stray non-numeric entry gives you one – and arithmetic on it failed four different ways: growth_rate() and per_capita() returned a column of NAs behind base R’s “‘/’ not meaningful for factors”; share_of_world(), rank_countries() and aggregate_regions() raised an opaque error from inside dplyr::mutate(); gini() managed “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”; and morans_i() quietly returned a plausible-looking statistic. These, plus index_to(), diff_by_country(), beta_convergence(), sigma_convergence() and theil(), now name the column and its actual type. lag_by_country() is deliberately unchanged: it does no arithmetic, so lagging a factor or character column remains legitimate.
• aggregate_regions() reported a figure for groups it had no data for. Values are dropped before aggregating, so a group whose every value is missing had nothing left – and each base function got that wrong differently: "sum" returned 0, "mean" and "weighted_mean" NaN, and "min"/"max" -Inf/Inf plus a warning. “This region’s total is 0” is a claim, not an absence, which matters in a package built around honest missing-data handling. All six now return NA, as "min"/"max" were already meant to; groups that do have data are unaffected, and a partially-missing group still aggregates the values it has. ?aggregate_regions documents this.
• complete_years() failed on a zero-row panel, where every other panel helper returns zero rows. With no years it reached seq(min(numeric(0)), max(numeric(0))) and died on base R’s “‘from’ must be a finite number”; with years supplied it died on tidyr’s “Can’t recycle year (size 3) to size 0”. Neither message names anything the caller did. It now returns the empty frame, columns intact, for all three method values – while still reporting a bad years or value argument.
• bivariate_map() and cartogram_map() (and so dorling_map()) failed inside their optional dependency when no row carried the values they need. This is easier to hit than it sounds: attach_geometry() joins geometry-on-the-left, so a frame with nothing in it arrives at the plotting verb as full-length columns of NA. biscale then indexed sVar[1:(length(sVar) - 1)], which becomes 1:-1, and reported “only 0’s may be mixed with negative subscripts”; cartogram compared NA in if (meanSizeError < maxSizeError) and reported “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”. Neither mentions the data. Both now say which columns are empty, as spike_map() already did, and both reject a non-numeric column by name. Partly-missing columns still draw from the rows that do have values.
• gini() could kill the R session. It computed the weighted mean absolute difference with outer(), an n-by-n matrix – fine for the ~200 countries it is written for, but it is exported and accepts any numeric vector. A geometry-joined column is 99,338 rows, needing about 79 GB, and the process was killed outright: no error, no message, no result. The kernel is now the sorted cumulative form, O(n log n) in time and O(n) in memory, which agrees with the pairwise definition to floating-point noise (verified across ties, zero weights, single values and 340 random cases) and handles a million values in well under a second. Every documented figure is unchanged.
• aggregate_regions() silently multiplied its answer when given a frame with map geometry attached. The polygon backend expands each country into hundreds of vertex rows, so a row-wise total counts it once per vertex: for the bundled snapshot a regional total of 497,265 came out as 280,951,373. It is reachable directly off world_data(geometry = "polygon"). It cannot de-duplicate on iso3c, since by = c("region", "year") roll-ups legitimately repeat a country, so it now warns and says what to do instead. Country-level tables and panels are unaffected.
• ?audit_coverage described the raw list it returns without mentioning that the object is classed and has a print() method, so what you actually see at the console is a formatted report rather than the list. Both are now documented.
• world_geometry("ocean") drew nothing at all, in every projection. Under the S2 engine – sf’s default since 1.0, so everywhere – st_as_sfc(st_bbox(-180, -90, 180, 90)) collapses to a two-point, zero-area polygon, and the collapse is invisible because st_bbox() reports the stored extent instead of recomputing it from the (empty) coordinates. The rectangle is now built by constructing the ring explicitly, which S2 never gets to reinterpret, and its edges are densified so a curved projection has points to bend: the layer comes out at Earth’s true surface area (5.1e14 m2) and covers 98-100% of the countries layer across all nine world projections. st_break_antimeridian() is no longer applied here at all – with lon_0 = 0 it cut the outline at +/-180, its own edges, taking it down to two thirds of the globe and, under Mollweide, to nothing.
• Where an ocean background cannot be drawn, world_geometry() now says so instead of returning an invisible layer: the four hemispheric projections ("orthographic", "azimuthal_equal_area", "north_polar", "south_polar") show half the globe, and a whole-globe rectangle cannot be recentred without covering only part of the map.
• world_geometry("coastline") and world_geometry("ocean") returned a bare sfc rather than the sf object ?world_geometry promises (and that the other four what values deliver), so dplyr verbs failed on exactly those two. Both are now sf; the geometry is unchanged.
• ?world_geometry’s @return was a single line naming no columns. It now lists what each what returns, and warns that the sf backend’s centroid_lon/centroid_lat are in the object’s own CRS – projected metres, not degrees, so centroid_lon for France is 174097, not 2.1. Use country_meta$centroid_lon for degrees.
• sf::st_coordinates() failed on world_geometry("countries", geometry = "sf"), in every projection including the default. Natural Earth supplies 177 uniform MULTIPOLYGONs, but st_break_antimeridian() runs an st_intersection() internally that collapses a single-part MULTIPOLYGON to a POLYGON, leaving 148 POLYGON + 29 MULTIPOLYGON – an sfc_GEOMETRY column, which st_coordinates() does not support. Extracting vertices from the package’s own geometry, an ordinary thing to want, therefore errored with “not implemented for objects of class sfc_GEOMETRY”. The column is cast back to MULTIPOLYGON, which is a type change only: row count, codes and land area are unchanged. ?world_geometry also now notes that a hemispheric projection returns empty geometries for the far side, where the same st_coordinates() limitation applies for a different and correct reason.
• world_map() accepted a frame with no geometry, returned a ggplot object without complaint, and then failed only when the plot was printed – with ggplot2’s “Problem while computing aesthetics … Caused by error in .data$long”, which names nothing the caller did. It validated the fill column but never the long/lat/group columns the polygon path needs. Forgetting attach_geometry() is the easiest mistake to make here, and it is easy precisely because the other plotting verbs do not need it: tile_map(), bubble_map(), spike_map() and globe_map() all take a country-level frame, so world_map(snap, gdp) looks like it should work too. It now says so at the call, and names the fix. facet_map() delegates to world_map() and is covered by the same check; the four country-level verbs are deliberately unchanged, and a test pins that asymmetry.
• interactive_map(engine = "ggiraph") reported a missing geometry differently from the other engines. It assembles its own ggplot rather than calling world_map(), so it bypassed that check and failed at render time on .data$long, while engine = "plotly" named the problem properly. Both now give the same message. ?interactive_map also documents that the "leaflet" engine attaches geometry itself if handed a country-level table, which the others do not.
• The numeric fill styles now require a numeric column. style = "continuous" and "binned" reached ggplot2 and failed only when the plot was printed (“Discrete value supplied to a continuous scale”, “Binned scales only support continuous data”), neither naming the column; "quantile" and "jenks" did not fail at all – the break computation returns early on a non-numeric column, so the fill fell through to the discrete scale and drew a plausible map whose legend claimed quantile bins it had never computed. The reverse direction, style = "categorical" on a numeric column, was already guarded, so this closes the pair. animate_world() and facet_map() inherit it.
• attach_geometry() no longer warns when given a panel. Joining one row per country-year against polygon vertices is legitimately many-to-many – it is what animate_world() and facet_map() are for – so dplyr’s “unexpected many-to-many relationship” warning was noise. The relationship is now declared, as the cache merge already did.
• ?repair_country_names now says which way the stringdist fallback errs. The threshold argument already noted that the metric changes when stringdist is absent (Jaro-Winkler versus a length-normalised edit distance); it now adds that the fallback is the more conservative of the two, repairing a subset of what Jaro-Winkler would – mainly missing transposed letters, as in “Frnace” – and never choosing a different country. Measured over 120 single-typo names: 98 repaired with stringdist, 77 without, none repaired that stringdist did not, and no wrong repairs either way. A test now holds the package to that.
• simplify_geometry() undid the geometry-type fix above. Both simplifiers collapse a single-part MULTIPOLYGON to a POLYGON, so a homogeneous input came back as a mixed sfc_GEOMETRY column and sf::st_coordinates() failed on the result – the same defect as world_geometry("countries"), restored one step downstream. The output is cast back; row count and geometry are unchanged.
• simplify_geometry()’s keep argument now means roughly the same thing with and without rmapshaper. The sf::st_simplify() fallback was given a fixed dTolerance of (1 - keep) * 10000, i.e. metres whatever the coordinate system: 9 km on a projected frame, which barely simplified anything (79% of vertices kept at keep = 0.1), and 9000 degrees on a lon/lat frame, which is meaningless and only survivable because preserveTopology keeps a husk. The tolerance is now scaled to the object’s own extent, so the fallback behaves the same on either coordinate system and responds monotonically to keep. ?simplify_geometry says that only rmapshaper honours keep as a true proportion.
• gini()’s negative-value warning said Returning "NA", which reads as the two-character string rather than the missing value. It now renders as NA, matching the same correction already made elsewhere.
• The test suite no longer fails on R >= 4.6. Several tests set options(scipen = -10) to exercise the scientific-notation bugs fixed above, but R 4.6 clamps scipen to a minimum of -9 and warns (“invalid ‘scipen’ -10, used -9”), so an exact round-trip assertion failed and three warnings were raised – an ERROR under R CMD check on current R, even though the package code itself was correct. The tests now use -9 and compare against the value R actually stored.
• The wdj_overrides() soft-deprecation notice told the wrong people. It lived in the shared function body, so in an interactive session it fired for country_overrides() – the very replacement it recommends – and for every public function that takes the override table as a default argument (standardize_country(), convert_country(), attach_geometry(), check_country_match(), repair_country_names(), world_data() and the geometry backends). Callers were advised to stop using a function they had never written, and the advice was unactionable. The notice now fires only for a direct call to wdj_overrides(); the table itself is unchanged. The documented default is now country_overrides(), so ?attach_geometry and friends name a function the reader can actually look up.
• ?country_borders’s whole-world example runs again. It was wrapped in \dontrun{} on the grounds that the whole-world adjacency is expensive, but it takes about a quarter of a second from a cold session – only 2.7 times the region = "Europe" subset that already ran live. CRAN discourages \dontrun{} for code that can be executed, so it is now a guarded \donttest{} and is actually exercised by the check. That leaves six \dontrun{} topics, each genuinely unrunnable: a live World Bank fetch, an HTML widget, a DuckDB connection, a 60-frame GIF, and a call that deletes files.
• ?country_overrides’s advice for accented names in a non-UTF-8 locale did not work in that locale. It offered de-accenting with iconv(x, to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT") as an alternative to running under UTF-8, but //TRANSLIT is itself locale-dependent: under LC_CTYPE=C it returns NA, or replaces each accent with ? when given an explicit from = "UTF-8", so nothing resolves either way. The section now says de-accenting has to happen while still in a UTF-8 locale, and that the ASCII spellings the override table carries are what work everywhere.
• A bad options(countryatlas.workers) reached mclapply(). The option is advertised in this file, so a stray value is reachable: "abc", NA and Inf all became NA workers and surfaced as “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed” from deep inside a parallel fetch, while c(2, 4) silently used the larger of the two. It is now checked, and the message names the option. Values below one are still clamped to one, as before – that path was never the problem.
• A bad options(countryatlas.cache_dir) did the same thing one layer down. The option is documented in ?clear_wdi_cache, and a stray value reached dir.exists()/dir.create(): NA, a number and TRUE each gave “invalid filename argument”, character(0) gave “argument is of length zero”, and a two-element vector gave “the condition has length > 1”. It is now checked and the message names the option. An empty string is still accepted and still degrades to session-only caching; NA_character_, which used to degrade silently, now errors like the other bad values.
• An empty cache directory failed on R 4.6 but not on R 4.4. dir.create("") warns and returns FALSE on R 4.4, so the fallback to session-only caching worked; on R 4.6 it errors with “zero-length ‘path’ argument”, which escaped the surrounding suppressWarnings() and propagated. An empty path is now recognised as “no disk cache” before the filesystem is touched, so the behaviour is the same on every R version.
• ?theil now says that a row with a missing group is dropped along with rows whose value is missing, so the decomposition’s total is computed over the grouped subset and can differ from the ungrouped theil(x). On the bundled snapshot that difference is entirely Puerto Rico, which has no region. theil() also gains numeric anchors on the bundled data, which gini() already had.
• Every sf-backed verb leaked sf’s internal chatter as message() conditions. The console was already clean, but silencing it by redirecting the message stream leaves the conditions themselves travelling to whatever handler the caller installed, so purrr::quietly(), testthat::expect_silent() or a plain withCallingHandlers() around attach_geometry(), neighbors(), country_borders(), locate_country() or morans_i() still saw three to nine “Spherical geometry (s2) switched off” / “assumes that they are planar” notices. They are now muffled as well as redirected. (The comment claiming these notices bypass R’s condition system was simply wrong – they are ordinary message()s, and only a few GDAL diagnostics need the stream redirect.)
• ?world_geometry called all four azimuthal projections “hemispheric” and said the far side comes back as empty geometries. That is true of "orthographic" alone; "azimuthal_equal_area", "north_polar" and "south_polar" are Lambert equal-area and image the whole globe, with the far side stretched around the rim and nothing dropped. The page now distinguishes them and points at region for a genuine polar view, and the error "ocean" raises in those projections no longer gives “it shows one hemisphere” as the reason.
• ?world_geometry now documents the Natural Earth features that have no ISO code and so come back with iso3c NA – Somaliland at every scale, plus the Indian Ocean Territories and Ashmore and Cartier Islands from "medium" on.
• ?theme_world_map said the theme is used by all the package’s plotting functions. bivariate_map() is the exception – it applies biscale::bi_theme() so the map matches biscale’s own legend, and its axis titles, panel grid and background differ as a result. The page now names the exception.
• ?simplify_geometry documented keep as a proportion “(0-1)”, but keep = 0 is rejected on both simplifier paths (it would leave nothing to draw). The range now reads “greater than 0 and at most 1”.
• complete_years(value = ) fabricated data in the columns it was not given. A numeric column left out of value was classified as a static attribute and carry-filled, so naming fewer columns invented more figures – and even method = "none", which exists to complete the grid and fill nothing, produced a carried-forward value for the missing year. Measure columns are now excluded from the attribute carry whether or not they are named; an unnamed one stays NA in the rows complete() adds. value = NULL behaves exactly as before.
• aggregate_regions() silently ignored weight for every fun except "weighted_mean", returning the unweighted figure – on European GDP per capita, 38,323 where the population-weighted answer is 29,896. Passing weight with any other fun now errors, mirroring the existing abort when fun = "weighted_mean" is given no weight.
• flow_map() dropped a flow whose endpoint it could not resolve without a word, and when nothing resolved it returned a bare world map with no arc layer at all. It now warns, naming the values it could not place and pointing at origin – feeding it iso3c codes while origin still defaults to "country.name" is the usual cause, and it drew a blank map.
• ?in_group now says that a value origin cannot resolve answers FALSE, indistinguishable from a country that is genuinely outside the group, and points at check_country_match() for telling the two apart.
• world_map() / globe_map() passed palette, title, legend and na_label to viridisLite and ggplot2 unchecked, so a mistake came back in their vocabulary rather than the package’s: palette = c("magma", "viridis") reached a bare switch() and reported “EXPR must be a length 1 vector”, and a numeric palette was accepted without a word. A length-2 title or legend was accepted too, and ggplot2 then drew both strings on top of each other. All four are now checked; world_query() already validated the two of them it takes (palette and title). na_label keeps its documented tolerance – there is one NA key, so the first element wins and a length-1 NA still means “leave the default formatter alone” – but it now says so instead of doing it silently. A number is still a perfectly good label.
• country_data() / world_data() resolved a conflict between latest and the shape arguments silently, and with opposite precedence depending on the year: a multi-year year overrode latest = TRUE, while a single year had latest = TRUE override panel = TRUE. The winner is unchanged – both were already the documented behaviour – but the call now warns, naming the argument being dropped, instead of returning a shape nobody asked for.
• locate_country(tolerance_km = ) was unvalidated, and a character value did not merely give an opaque message – it produced a wrong answer. R compares dkm <= tolerance_km as strings when the tolerance is character, and "2650" <= "a" is TRUE, so every unmatched point snapped to its nearest country however far away it was: a mid-Pacific point came back as Fiji, where the documented behaviour is that open ocean stays NA. Now checked, before the sf gate.
• Three more scalars the validation sweep had missed now name themselves instead of failing in a dependency’s vocabulary: correlate_indicators(min_n = ) (an NA gave “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”, a length-2 value “the condition has length > 1”), and dorling_map(k = ) / dorling_map(itermax = ) (which reported cartogram’s “all sizes are missing and/or non-positive” and an assertion naming its internal maxiter).
• interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") reported a missing ggsql >= 0.4.1 for a frame that simply had no geometry – sending the caller after a package that has not shipped in the R bindings at all, only to meet the real error afterwards. The sf check now runs ahead of the package gates. spin_globe() had the same inversion for its fill column: its scalars were moved ahead of the animation gate in an earlier pass, but the column check was not, so a mistyped column still asked for gifski.
• join_world() could not read a column of ISO codes without being told to. Its fallback detector tried each character column with origin = "country.name", which does not match most alpha-3 codes, so a column of them was rejected outright – and a column named iso3c was found by name but still read as country names, so join_world(tibble(iso3c = c("FRA", "JPN"))) warned that nothing matched and returned all NA. Detection now tries the code schemes as well and carries the one that worked through to the conversion, so iso3c, iso_a3, iso2c and an unrecognised name like code all resolve. An explicit origin still wins, and a column whose name implies a scheme is only read that way if the scheme actually resolves it.
• A bounding-box region on the polygon backend only filters vertices; it cannot clip a polygon, so a country crossing the edge keeps a truncated ring that geom_polygon() closes with a straight chord (France loses 202 of 605 vertices and the two ends sit 15 degrees apart). Nothing in the returned tibble showed it, and the vignette presented the box as clipping the shapes. It now warns and points at geometry = "sf", where the clip is a real sf::st_crop(); ?world_geometry and the vignette say which is which.
• attach_geometry() on a frame that already had geometry multiplied the rows instead of refusing. The join is by country, and a polygon frame holds one row per vertex, so re-attaching joins a country’s vertices against themselves: the bundled snapshot went from 99,338 rows to 310,977,360. The call declares relationship = "many-to-many" – correctly, since one country really does have many vertices – which switches off dplyr’s own guard against exactly this. It now errors, and says to pass the country-level table.
• share_of_world() on a grouped frame with no year column returned a share of the group, not of the world: sum() inside mutate() is per group, so a frame grouped by continent came back with a column that summed to 5 instead of 1, under a name and a help page that both say “world”. A panel was already safe by accident, because the function regroups by year and that replaces the caller’s groups. It now ignores the grouping in both cases, and says so where it would have mattered.
• The verbs that add a column now say when they replace one the caller already had. rank_countries() overwrote rank, percentile and z_score, and per_capita(), share_of_world(), growth_rate(), index_to(), lag_by_country() and diff_by_country() overwrote their target column, all in silence – a user’s own rank column simply vanished. It is a warning, not an error, because re-running a verb on its own output is legitimate. standardize_country() is deliberately exempt: add names the columns literally, so replacing an existing continent is what was asked for.
• geom_country_labels() on an sf map failed with rlang’s internal “Column long not found in .data”. The layer reads the polygon backend’s long/lat columns, and its own aes() was evaluated against the sf frame before the guard inside could run. It now errors with its own message and points at ggplot2::geom_sf_text(aes(label = iso3c)), which is documented on the help page too.
• geom_country_labels() put every country that crosses the antimeridian on the far side of the planet when the frame had no group column. group is what identifies a country’s separate pieces, and the label belongs on the largest; without it the fallback averaged the raw longitude range, so measured against the largest-piece centroid Fiji was 177.8 degrees out, New Zealand 169.6, and even the USA 96.6 – its Aleutian tail dragging the mid-range to the Gulf of Guinea. Averaging in wrapped coordinates cuts those to 0.2, 6.9 and 31.4. It remains an approximation, and the help page now says that placement is exact only while group is present.

Housekeeping

• gini() and theil() returned a silent NaN when the input contained an infinity. Inf is not NA, so it passed na.rm and (for Theil) the non-positive filter, then made the mean infinite and every share Inf/Inf. Every other verb propagates an infinity visibly – Inf in, Inf out, which the caller can see – but an inequality index has no such value to report, so both now warn and return NA, as they already did for a zero total weight. Infinite weights are caught too. NaN is still treated as NA and dropped.

• ?theil promised a tibble whenever groups is supplied, but every degenerate path – nothing left after na.rm, a zero total weight, an infinity – returns a single NA instead. The help page now says so.

• dorling_map(k = 0) passed validation and then failed inside cartogram with “all sizes are missing and/or non-positive”. check_number()’s bounds are inclusive, so lo = 0 admitted a value the next layer cannot use – the same hole the integer ceilings were added to close, at the other end of the range. It is now rejected with a message naming k; anything above zero still works.

• ?countryatlas gains an Options section. Two of the three options the package reads – countryatlas.workers and countryatlas.gdp_compat – were described only in this changelog, which is not reference documentation, so a reader of the help pages had no way to find them. (wdj_workers()’s own comment noted that the option was “advertised in NEWS”, which is how a bad value became reachable.) All three are now documented where they are looked for, and a test fails if a future option is read without being listed.

• The test suite runs in a quarter of the time (R CMD check’s test phase went from 389s to 92s). One block asked neighbors() for each country in turn and then again for each of that country’s neighbours, to confirm the reverse edge – and neighbors() recomputes the whole world’s sf::st_touches() adjacency on every call, so that was ~465 rebuilds and 292 seconds, four fifths of the suite. neighbors() is vectorised, so one call does the same work. The same properties are asserted (irreflexive, no repeated pair, every edge symmetric), and a failure now names the offending countries rather than only counting them.

• ?neighbors now says to pass a vector rather than loop, since that cost is invisible from the outside: every call rebuilds the whole world’s adjacency, so asking about one country costs the same as asking about all of them, and adding countries to a single call only adds the filtering. Measured here, one country takes about as long as 153 of them, which makes a loop over them roughly two orders of magnitude more work. The note names country_borders() as where the cost comes from. A test pins the fact the advice rests on – one country_borders() call per neighbors() call, whatever the length of x.

• ?attach_geometry claimed that Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Macao, Tuvalu and the British Virgin Islands have geometry in “no backend at any scale”. Only Gibraltar does not: the other four are carried by the sf backend at scale = "medium", which is the very fix the preceding sentence recommends for microstates. It was the no-tile list from ?world_tiles – coincidentally the same five names – pasted into a paragraph about geometry. Corrected, and the section’s coverage counts (215 snapshot countries; 210, 169 and 214 carried) are now pinned by a test, so an upstream Natural Earth change surfaces as a failure rather than as silently wrong advice.

• as_ggsql_source(format = "parquet") wrote into the working directory when no path was given: the default was the bare relative path "<name>.parquet". CRAN policy is that a package writes nowhere but the session’s temporary directory unless the caller says otherwise. The default is now a file of that name under tempdir(), and since the function returns the path the workflow is unchanged; an explicit path still writes exactly where you point it. spin_globe() already defaulted to tempfile(), and no other export writes at all.

• ?country_meta and ?world_snapshot now say that their country columns disagree, and why. country_meta carries countrycode’s English names and world_snapshot the World Bank’s, so 38 of the 215 shared countries are labelled differently (“South Korea” against “Korea, Rep.”). Each table is faithful to its own source and neither is wrong, but joining the two on iso3c leaves you holding two country columns with nothing to explain the difference – the very reconciliation country_join() advertises, using the same example. The count is pinned by a test, along with the referential consistency of all five code columns against country_meta.

• ?world_data and ?country_data now say where the country label comes from, because the same call produces two different spellings: a successful fetch carries the World Bank’s names (“Korea, Rep.”), while the country spine used when the fetch returns nothing carries the countrycode names (“South Korea”) – as does every other function in the package. Nothing can reconcile that offline, since the World Bank spelling only exists in the response, so both pages now point at iso3c as the stable key and at convert_country(iso3c, to = "country") for one consistent set of labels.

• utils::globalVariables() declared 29 names where 7 are needed. Emptying it and reading what R CMD check actually reports showed the rest were covered by the .data$x idiom the code uses throughout, which needs no declaration at all; three of them (subregion, NY.GDP.PCAP.KD, gdp_per_capita_2015) never appeared as bare symbols anywhere, only in a comment or as string literals. A stale entry is worse than clutter: it silences the “no visible binding” NOTE for a new bare use of the same name, which is the warning that would otherwise catch a typo. A test now fails if a declared name is not a real bare symbol in R/.

• Six exported functions failed when the package was loaded but not attached – countryatlas::dissolve_country(), distance_between(), country_groups(), in_group(), tile_map() and world_geometry(region = <group name>) all died with “object ‘historical_codes’ not found” or similar. They referred to the bundled datasets by bare name, and a bare name resolves only while the package is on the search path: under countryatlas::fn() in a script with no library() call, the lazy-data objects are not reachable. They are now countryatlas::-qualified. Every test in the suite attaches the package, so nothing caught this; a static check now fails if a bare reference reappears.

• per_capita() failed when the caller’s frame already had a column named .wdj_pop, the internal name used for the fetched population. The join suffixed both sides to .wdj_pop.x / .wdj_pop.y, so the column the division reads came back NULL and base R reported “replacement has 0 rows, data has 2”. Any pre-existing column of that name is now dropped before the join. Only the branch that fetches population was affected – passing pop explicitly never touched it.

• Two verbs leaked someone else’s message on an empty frame. facet_map() gave ggplot2’s “Faceting variables must have at least one value”, which names neither the argument nor the package; it now says the frame has no rows to facet, and notes that the other map verbs draw an empty panel instead. geom_country_labels() ran the centroid summary over nothing, where range() warns twice and dplyr adds a deprecation note on top – it now returns early, silent as it is on a full frame. Every other plotting verb already handled a zero-row frame cleanly, either drawing an empty panel or naming the reason it cannot.

• ?attach_geometry now says that geometry is attached once per row, not once per country. A panel wants exactly that – one row per country-year, each carrying the shape – but a frame that repeats a country by accident draws it more than once, and only the last one painted is visible. dplyr’s own many-to-many warning is suppressed by the relationship the join declares, so nothing signals it.

• ?country_data’s example quoted a retired World Bank indicator. The bank replaced the EN.ATM.CO2E.* carbon series with the AR5 greenhouse-gas series, and the bundled common_indicators table had already been updated, but the example still asked for EN.ATM.CO2E.KT – so anyone copying it got a warning and an all-NA column. It now uses EN.GHG.CO2.MT.CE.AR5, which returns data. R CMD check reports examples “OK” without failing on the warning, so nothing surfaced this; a test now checks every indicator code quoted in R/, man/ or the vignettes against the bundled table.

• country_groups_tbl was out of date by two years in four places, while carrying an as_of stamp of 2026-06-01 that claimed otherwise. Sweden was missing from NATO (acceded 7 March 2024; Finland had been added, so the table had been maintained to 2023 and no further), Angola was still in OPEC (left 1 January 2024), BRICS still held only its original five (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE joined in January 2024, Indonesia in January 2025), and The Gambia was missing from the Commonwealth (rejoined 2018). Corrected, so the counts are now NATO 32, OPEC 12, BRICS 10 and Commonwealth 56. Saudi Arabia is deliberately still absent from BRICS: it was invited in the 2024 round but has never confirmed accession. in_group("Sweden", "NATO") returned FALSE before this.

• options(countryatlas.cache_dir = ) was ignored once a cached fetch had happened. The memoised fetcher was built on first use and kept for the rest of the session, so relocating the cache afterwards silently kept writing to the original directory – and ?clear_wdi_cache offers that option as the way to relocate the cache without saying it has to be set first. It only ever took effect because clear_wdi_cache() happened to reset the state. The fetcher is now rebuilt when the directory changes, and the “cannot write to the cache directory” notice is once per directory rather than once per session, so a second unwritable location is not swallowed.

• A corrupt cache entry was reported as a World Bank outage. An interrupted write leaves a truncated or empty .rds, and readRDS()’s “unknown input format” surfaced under “Could not fetch indicator … from the World Bank API”, sending the caller off to debug a connection that was fine – the same misattribution already fixed for an unwritable cache directory, now fixed on the read side. The warning names the cache and gives the recovery command, which matters because the bad entry persists: every later call degrades to the country spine until clear_wdi_cache(disk = TRUE) is run. A genuine network failure still blames the network.

• When the cache directory was unwritable, caching stopped working altogether instead of falling back to the session. The in-memory memo that stands in for the disk cache lives in one process, but multiple indicators are fetched with parallel::mclapply(), so each worker warmed a memo and then exited with it: every call re-fetched every indicator, hitting the World Bank API again and again with nothing to show for it. Fetching is now serial when the memo is memory-only – the repeated round-trips cost far more than the one-shot parallel speedup – and unchanged when the disk cache is available, since a disk memo is shared by every worker.

• A failed indicator was dropped from the result without a word, whenever more than one indicator was requested. fetch_one_safe() degrades gracefully and warns – “Could not fetch indicator … from the World Bank API”, or the corrupt-cache variant – but it runs inside parallel::mclapply(), which brings back a worker’s value and discards the conditions it signalled. Since having several indicators is exactly what makes the fetch fork, and parallel = TRUE is the default, the common case was the silent one: a column simply missing from the table with no explanation. A single indicator, which never forks, warned correctly – which is why this went unnoticed. Conditions are now carried back and re-signalled in the calling process, on the serial path too so both report identically, and one problem is reported once even if two entries name the same series.

• Country lookups silently returned NA in Turkish, Azeri and Crimean Tatar locales. toupper() and tolower() follow LC_CTYPE, and in those locales i and I are not a case pair: toupper("idn") returns a dotted capital I, not "IDN", and tolower("ISO3C") returns a dotless i. Five places folded an ASCII identifier that way and then compared it against plain ASCII, so every ISO code containing an i (IDN, IND, IRL, IRN, ISL, ISR, ITA, BIH, CIV, FIN, …) failed to resolve. The failures were quiet and the blast radius uneven: world_geometry(region = c("ind", "chn")) returned Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Isle of Man and India – one unfoldable element made the whole vector fall through to name matching, which then matched on substrings; dissolve_country("SOUTH VIETNAM") stopped finding its alias; and join_world() on a frame with ISO3C and geo columns picked geo, joining on the wrong column entirely. Identifier folding is now done with an explicit ASCII table (ascii_upper() / ascii_lower()) and does not consult the locale.

  This fixes countryatlas’s own folding, which covers every path keyed on an ISO code, a column name or an alias. It cannot fix matching on a country name: that goes through countrycode, whose regexes are themselves locale-sensitive (countrycode("Ireland", "country.name", "iso3c") is NA under tr_TR). So a user with LC_COLLATE=tr_TR still sees name-keyed gaps – notably the polygon backend, which labels its geometry by joining region names to codes, so world_geometry(region = "IND") comes back with 21 rows of Siachen Glacier instead of India. Working around that would mean forcing the C locale around every countrycode call, which risks mangling accented names for everyone else; it is left for upstream.

• The two-core cap that CRAN policy requires of a check was applied only when _R_CHECK_LIMIT_CORES_ held the exact string "TRUE". R CMD check --as-cran does set it to that – but only when it is not already set, so the value that actually arrives is whatever the check flavour or CI exported, and R’s own parser for these variables reads "true", "True", "T", "1", "yes", "Yes" and "YES" as true as well. Under any of those spellings the cap did not apply and a multi-indicator fetch forked detectCores() - 1 workers in the middle of a check. The test is now inverted: a value that is set and does not explicitly parse as false means “limit”, which also covers "warn". An explicit "false", "F", "0" or "no" is still honoured as a deliberate opt-out.

• ?world_data’s example called world_data(2020) unconditionally, and the default geometry = "polygon" backend comes from the suggested maps package. R CMD check runs \donttest{} blocks, so on a check flavour configured without suggested packages – CRAN runs one – that example failed with “The package "maps" is required for the polygon geometry backend”, taking the whole examples step down with it. Writing R Extensions requires code that uses a suggested package to be conditional, examples included; the call is now guarded with requireNamespace("maps"). The second call in the block passes geometry = "none" and needs nothing beyond the hard dependencies, so it is left to run unconditionally.

• The beyond-the-choropleth vignette failed to build wherever rnaturalearth was absent. Its chunk guard was has_sf <- requireNamespace("sf"), but the sf geometry backend gates on three packages – sf, rnaturalearth and rnaturalearthdata – so on a machine with sf but without the Natural Earth data the guarded chunk evaluated to TRUE, ran, and stopped R CMD build with “The packages "rnaturalearth" and "rnaturalearthdata" are required for the sf geometry backend”. The other two vignettes already tested for rnaturalearth; all three now test for the same trio the code itself gates on. Three tests had the same incomplete guard and errored rather than skipping in that configuration; they now share a skip_if_no_sf_geometry() helper.

• New hex logo, drawn by the package itself (data-raw/hex_logo.R): an orthographic globe — globe_map()’s projection — carrying a viridis choropleth of world_snapshot GDP per capita on Natural Earth geometry joined by attach_geometry(), with spike_map()-style population spikes rising off the horizon and the binned-legend swatches under the wordmark.

• The gdp_per_capita_2015 compatibility alias (a one-cycle deprecation shim from 1.0.0) is now opt-in: set options(countryatlas.gdp_compat = TRUE) to restore it. The default is FALSE, so world_data() no longer emits a duplicate column.

• world_snapshot refreshed to year 2024 (was 2022) and rebuilt with the latest WDI data and curated overrides.

• country_groups_tbl membership date bumped to 2026-06-01 (was 2024-01-01).

• ?world_snapshot was out of sync with the rebuilt data (missing the “Snapshot year: 2024” note); regenerated.

• Fixed a stray orphaned code fence at the end of the countryatlas and ggsql vignette that broke its markdown structure.

• .Rbuildignore now excludes the session-local .claude/ directory, which git ignores but R CMD build does not, so it was shipping in the tarball and tripping R CMD check’s “hidden files and directories” NOTE.

• Comments in R/overrides.R are ASCII-only, so no source file carries non-ASCII characters outside a deliberate \U escape.

• ?world_snapshot no longer splits a code span across two source lines, which had left the checked-in .Rd disagreeing with what roxygen2 regenerates.

• beta_convergence() failed with a bare "subscript out of bounds" when the initial levels had no spread across countries. A constant predictor makes lm() return an NA coefficient, which summary() then drops entirely, so the lookup for it fell off the end. It now says that the initial levels have no spread and why that matters.

• The forking path is now tested. fetch_wdi(parallel = TRUE) is the default for a multi-indicator request, so wdj_lapply()’s mclapply branch runs on one of the package’s busiest code paths, yet no test reached it – every other test used a single indicator or passed parallel = FALSE. Confirmed: a parallel fetch is identical to the serial one, forking preserves order, ... reaches the workers, wdj_workers() honours options(countryatlas.workers) and CRAN’s two-core limit, and an error inside a fork is surfaced rather than left as a try-error for downstream code to trip over.

• The World Bank fetch and assembly path is now tested offline. It needs the network, so it had no coverage at all despite holding the least obvious logic in the package: fetch_wdi()’s multi-indicator reduce-merge (shared keys are coalesced rather than suffixed, and values stay aligned per country-year), its degradation when one indicator of several fails, country_data(latest = TRUE)’s “most recent non-NA” collapse (which opens the window at 1960 and skips a missing latest year), the panel key, the duplicate-key case where two iso2c codes map to one iso3c, and that cache = TRUE really short-circuits a repeated fetch. No defects were found; the tests pin the behaviour.

• spin_globe() validates n_frames / fps / width / height / lat before gating on gifski / magick, matching how globe_map() orders the two: a bad argument is the caller’s bug and the message should not depend on which optional packages happen to be installed.

• tile_map() phrased the missing-iso3c error differently from the three other verbs performing the identical check; all four now read the same.

• Half the examples that were marked \dontrun{} now actually run: it covered 14 of the 55 documented topics and now covers 7. Nine verbs gained executable examples – locate_country(), country_borders(), neighbors(), morans_i(), simplify_geometry(), bivariate_map(), cartogram_map(), dorling_map() and the polygon-backend globe_map() – having been unrunnable only because their examples made a live World Bank fetch. Driven by the bundled world_snapshot instead, and guarded with requireNamespace(), they are \donttest{} examples that execute in under half a second each. The safe form of clear_wdi_cache() is now a live example too. \dontrun{} remains only where the code genuinely cannot run in a check (a network fetch, an HTML widget, a written GIF, ggsql >= 0.4.1, or deleting files).

• The tests guarding this release’s fixes were verified by mutation: each fix was reverted in a scratch copy and the suite had to fail. 35 mutations, all now detected – but four were not at first, and each pointed at a real gap:

  • is.na() is TRUE for NaN as well, so the checks on theil()’s zero-weight result and its shares at perfect equality passed whether the value was the fixed NA or the NaN the bug produced. Both now assert the exact value.
  • Nothing verified that quantile breaks are computed on one value per country rather than per polygon vertex – the fix that forced this major version bump. Removing the de-duplication, or flipping the flag that controls it on either world_map() or globe_map()’s polygon backend, broke no test. There are now checks on the helper, on both call sites, and on the property that matters: roughly equal numbers of countries per colour.
  • interactive_map(tooltip = ) was unprotected: the existing tests assert the returned object’s class, which passes whether the argument is honoured or silently dropped – exactly the pre-2.0.0 bug. Both the "ggiraph" and "leaflet" engines are now checked on the column they are actually handed.

• Degenerate-but-valid input is now covered by tests: perfect equality (gini() / theil() return 0, not NaN), zero-variance columns (NaN z-scores and NA correlations rather than errors), duplicate (iso3c, year) panel rows, poles and antipodal great circles, collinear rings, all-NA and all-zero fill columns, and single-country frames.

• ?distance_between and ?country_meta now state which countries have no bundled centroid. country_meta is assembled from countrycode::codelist, which has no Kosovo row, so distance_between("Kosovo", "Serbia") is NA even though neighbors("Kosovo") and country_borders() know about it – and ten small or dependent territories have a row but no centroid. The @return already said NA was possible; it did not say which countries, and the asymmetry with the geometry backends was surprising.

• The same double-counting affected three more places, all gated on the presence of a group column – which polygon frames have and sf frames do not:

  • correlate_indicators() reported n and r over geometry rows rather than countries. That column exists precisely so a correlation computed on a few countries cannot masquerade as a world fact, so an inflated n defeated the point.
  • audit_coverage() reported the wrong country count and a wrong NA rate for every indicator.
  • bubble_map(backend = "sf") drew two bubbles for a divided country, where the polygon path already guaranteed one per country. All three now reduce whenever an iso3c column is present.

• Quantile and jenks breaks on the sf backend double-counted divided countries. The de-duplication added in this release skipped the sf path on the assumption that Natural Earth is one row per country, but it is not: Cyprus occupies two rows sharing one iso3c at 110m, as do Cyprus and India at 50m. Breaking on the raw column shifted the cut points enough to move real countries into the wrong bin – Saudi Arabia and Libya changed colour in the bundled snapshot at n_bins = 5. Both backends now de-duplicate on the key, so “one value per country” holds exactly rather than nearly.

• convert_country(x, to = "calling_code") returned alpha-3 country codes instead of telephone calling codes – "FRA" where 33 was meant. The shortcut was mapped to countrycode’s genc3c column, which is an ISO-style three-letter code, not a dialling prefix; it now maps to the telephone column, so France gives 33, the USA 1 and Japan 81. A source comment claimed the limitation was “documented as best-effort”, but ?convert_country never mentioned calling_code at all; the shortcut is now listed there.

• The Description field – the text CRAN renders on the package page – advertised nine map idioms while the package ships eleven: spike_map() and facet_map() (small multiples) were missing from the vocabulary list, and the analysis-helper examples predated this release’s inequality and convergence statistics. Every idiom it names now corresponds to an exported verb.

• ?countryatlas listed morans_i() under “Core data assembly” while _pkgdown.yml listed it under “Analysis helpers”, so the two navigational indexes described the same function as two different kinds of thing. It is a spatial statistic, so it now sits with gini(), theil() and the convergence measures on both surfaces.

• The @seealso cross-references are reciprocal. All three the package had pointed one way only: a reader of ?gini was sent to theil() but a reader of ?theil was sent nowhere, and likewise for beta_convergence()/sigma_convergence() and dissolve_country()/check_country_match(). ?theil did not link to gini() at all – it named Gini in prose without a cross-reference. The four related diagnostics (check_country_match(), repair_country_names(), dissolve_country(), plus historical_codes) now all reference each other.

• Every page taking a projection argument now says where the valid values are. Only world_map() enumerated the 13 projections and only world_geometry() pointed at it; the other eight entries said no more than “Projection.” (bivariate_map()) or “Projection options for the sf backend”, leaving a reader with nothing to go on. Relatedly, the three pages that document projection and recenter together described only the projection, so recenter’s meaning – a central meridian – was missing from world_data(), join_world() and attach_geometry().

• The rnaturalearthhires requirement is now documented on every page that takes a scale argument, not just ?world_geometry. Seven topics – world_data(), join_world(), attach_geometry(), locate_country(), country_borders(), neighbors() and morans_i() – described scale without mentioning that "large" is unobtainable from CRAN, so a reader of any of those pages met the gate with no warning.

• scale = "large" was offered as a plain option but needs the rnaturalearthhires package, which is not on CRAN and is not in Suggests. Left ungated, rnaturalearth responded by trying to install it into the user’s library from a non-CRAN repository and then failing obscurely. It is now gated with a message naming the package and the repository to get it from, and pointing at scale = "medium" (50m) as the option that needs nothing extra. ?world_geometry documents the requirement, and the sf & projections vignette no longer demonstrates the scale most readers cannot run.

• ?country_borders recommended a graph recipe that produced nonsense. igraph::graph_from_data_frame() treats the first two columns as the edge endpoints, and country_borders() returns iso3c_a, country_a, iso3c_b, country_b – so columns 1 and 2 are both endpoint A, and passing the whole tibble built edges from each country’s code to its own name (56 vertices instead of 37 for Europe, every French edge running FRA to "France"). The documented call now passes only the two code columns.

• ?neighbors and ?country_borders now warn that igraph also exports a neighbors() – taking a graph and a vertex rather than country names – so whichever package is attached later wins. ?country_borders recommends igraph for turning the adjacency into a graph, which walks users straight into the clash, so both pages now say to qualify the call as countryatlas::neighbors(). It is the only collision between this package’s exports and any of dplyr, ggplot2, tidyr, tibble, sf, maps, WDI, countrycode, scales, leaflet, plotly, igraph, raster, terra, purrr, stringr, forcats, readr or the base packages.

• ?country_overrides now documents why every name in the override table is plain ASCII: ASCII spellings match in any locale, whereas accented spellings rely on countrycode’s own matching and resolve to NA under a non-UTF-8 locale (LC_CTYPE=C). The note points at iconv(x, to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT") for input that may carry accents.

• The test suite is now green under CRAN’s noSuggests configuration (_R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_=true), which runs with every optional package absent. Four tests called globe_map(backend = "polygon") or morans_i() without guarding on mapproj / sf, so they errored on the dependency gate instead of exercising what they were written to check.

• The quantile/jenks binning that world_map() and both globe_map() backends perform lived as three near-copies kept in step by hand; it is now one internal helper. Verified behaviour-preserving by comparing the rendered fill of every style x n_bins x backend combination before and after (50 fingerprints, ~2.6M values, all identical).

• Documented \value claims are now asserted as executable contracts, so Rd prose cannot drift from the code in silence. The 36 exports whose \value makes a specific structural promise – named columns, a single row, an attached "model" object, a length matching the input – are covered; the rest return a ggplot, a layer or a widget and are checked by their own tests. Every claim audited was already accurate; the tests keep it that way.

• The four exports that had no test call site at all – wdi_search(), clear_wdi_cache(), animate_world() and cartogram_map() – are covered, including cartogram_map(type = "contiguous") (the default type, previously never exercised) and wdi_search()’s zero-match and single-match paths.

• The README’s “optional features at a glance” table is corrected against what the code actually gates on: spin_globe() was listed as needing only maps + mapproj when it also hard-requires gifski or magick; the ggsql row overstated the requirements of as_ggsql_source() (which never needs ggsql) and understated the version interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") needs; and locate_country(), flow_map() and bubble_map() were missing.

• The countryatlas and ggsql vignette said DRAW spatial “was added in 0.4.1” as plain fact; it now says that version is newer than what CRAN ships, which is why the query-executing chunks are shown but not evaluated.

• The package-level overview (?countryatlas) was missing simplify_geometry() and clear_wdi_cache() from its section list, though _pkgdown.yml had both.

• The set of ISO codes the package treats as countries was computed in two places (name matching and the World Bank aggregate filter); it now comes from one internal helper, which region resolution uses as well, so the three callers cannot drift apart.

• New offline test suites pin the things a structural test cannot: closed-form anchors for the hand-rolled numerical kernels (haversine distance, spherical polygon area, great-circle interpolation, Gini/Theil, sigma and beta convergence, Moran’s I against an independently built weights matrix) and internal-consistency checks on every bundled dataset (no duplicate or unknown iso3c, coordinates in range, one country per world_tiles cell, historical_codes in step with its alias table, and country_meta centroids still agreeing with polygon_centroids()).

• README and vignettes now demonstrate every exported function: wdi_search(), country_codes(), complete_years(), growth_rate() / index_to(), repair_country_names(), country_join_all(), locate_country() and facet_map() gained worked examples, and the vignettes prefer country_overrides() over the soft-deprecated wdj_overrides(). The README’s rendered output and figures were stale (pre-dating the quantile-breaks fix and the gdp_per_capita_2015 opt-in) and have been re-rendered from the 2.0.0 code.

• geofacet is dropped from Suggests: no code ever used it, and ?tile_map / the README claimed a geofacet-backed small-multiples feature that did not exist. Facet a tile_map() like any other ggplot, or use facet_map() for choropleth small multiples.

• The README’s figures are shipped in the tarball again, so the images on the CRAN package page resolve. .Rbuildignore excluded the generated .pngs but not the (much larger) .gif, which left six of the seven images broken.

• ?world_snapshot’s @format said “two elements” while listing three, and advertised an sf element that is NULL in the released package. It now documents what actually ships and points at attach_geometry() for geometry.

• ?attach_geometry documents which countries each geometry backend actually carries. Rows with no matching geometry are dropped silently, and the sf backend’s scale changes which countries exist rather than only how detailed they are: of the 215 countries in world_snapshot, the default scale = "small" (110m) maps 169 and scale = "medium" maps 214. Five territories (Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Macao, Tuvalu, the British Virgin Islands) are in no backend at any scale.

• ?world_tiles and ?tile_map said “one square per country” without saying how many. The grid is the 239 country_meta rows that have a bundled centroid, so the 10 without one have no tile and tile_map() silently drops data rows keyed on them. Both are now documented, and a test pins the grid to that definition.

countryatlas 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2026-06-24

A single, comprehensive release that takes the package from a one-function proof of concept to a complete toolkit for joining world data to maps. The spirit is unchanged — ISO codes as the universal join key, one call to a map-ready table — but pushed to its full potential.

Breaking-ish changes

• world_data() is generalised but backward-compatible: world_data(2020) still returns the classic polygon-backed, GDP-per-capita tibble. The only visible change is the column name gdp_per_capita_2015 → gdp_per_capita. A one-cycle deprecation shim keeps gdp_per_capita_2015 available as an alias (toggle with options(countryatlas.gdp_compat = FALSE)).
• The 16 regions the previous version silently dropped (Kosovo, Micronesia, the Virgin Islands, Saint Martin, Bonaire/Saba/Sint Eustatius, the Canary Islands, Madeira/Azores, …) are now matched via [wdj_overrides()] instead of deleted, so they appear on maps. Diffs of map output will show increased coverage.

New: core data assembly

• world_data() gains indicator (one or many WDI codes; named vectors drive clean column names), multi-year panels, an sf backend (geometry = "sf"), region subsetting, latest, projections and caching.
• country_data() — the lightweight, one-row-per-country analysis table.
• world_geometry() — projected, region-subset geometry (countries, centroids, coastline, borders, graticule, ocean).

New: the join engine (exposed for your data)

• standardize_country(), join_world(), attach_geometry(), country_join().

New: diagnostics

• check_country_match(), wdj_overrides(), audit_coverage() — never lose a country silently.

New: reference data & translation

• convert_country() (flags, currency, tld, research codes), country_codes(), country_groups() / in_group(), wdi_search().
• Bundled datasets: world_snapshot, country_meta, common_indicators, country_groups_tbl, world_tiles.

New: analysis helpers

• per_capita(), aggregate_regions(), rank_countries(), complete_years().

New: visualization

• world_map() (continuous / binned / quantile / jenks / categorical), bubble_map(), bivariate_map(), cartogram_map(), tile_map(), flow_map(), animate_world(), interactive_map(), geom_country_labels(), theme_world_map().

Performance & offline

• WDI fetches are memoised with an optional on-disk cache; multiple indicators are fetched in parallel (parallel::mclapply) where supported. See clear_wdi_cache().
• The bundled world_snapshot lets every example, test and vignette run offline and deterministically.

Engineering

• Namespace hygiene (targeted @importFrom instead of blanket @import).
• Input validation with friendly cli / rlang errors.
• A testthat (3e) suite; network calls are skipped offline and on CRAN.
• Vignettes and a pkgdown site.
• Refreshed CI: R-CMD-check, test-coverage and pkgdown workflows.
• Heavy spatial dependencies (sf, rnaturalearth, cartogram, biscale, geofacet, gganimate, leaflet, …) are all in Suggests and gated by rlang::check_installed(), so the base install stays light.

Group memberships in country_groups_tbl are point-in-time as of 2024-01-01.

countryatlas 0.1.0

• Initial experimental release with a single world_data(year) function.