Pre-flight country-match report

A report on what will and will not match before you trust the map: the input, its iso3c, whether it matched, whether it is a historical (dissolved) entity, and a suggestion (the closest known country name by string distance) for misses. Surfaced automatically by join_world().

Usage

check_country_match(
  x,
  origin = "country.name",
  custom_match = country_overrides(),
  suggest = TRUE
)

Arguments

x

A vector of country names or codes.

origin

How to read x (any countrycode origin scheme).

custom_match

Overrides applied before matching (default country_overrides()).

suggest

Whether to compute closest-name suggestions for misses (requires the optional stringdist package; default TRUE).

Value

A tibble with columns input, iso3c, matched, historical, method and suggestion. method says how a name was matched, tier by tier, each tried only for what is still unmatched: "override" (the country_overrides() table), "regex_en" (countrycode's English patterns), "name_de", "name_es", "name_fr" and "name_it" (an exact match, ignoring case, accents and punctuation, against countrycode's German, Spanish, French and Italian names), "cldr" (the same against every name, short name and variant in the Unicode CLDR tables countrycode carries, in every language), "ambiguous" (a CLDR name for more than one country, which is left unmatched) or "none". Exact rather than countrycode's language patterns, which are unanchored and matched Somaliland to Somalia. For an origin other than a name it is "code".

Details

The historical flag matters even for rows that matched: countrycode silently resolves "USSR" to Russia's RUS, so Soviet-era data becomes Russian data without a warning. Rows flagged historical should usually be routed through dissolve_country() instead.

See also

dissolve_country() for resolving the entities this flags as historical to their successor states, and repair_country_names() for applying the suggestion column automatically.

Examples

check_country_match(c("USA", "Cote d'Ivoire", "Yugoslavia", "Wakanda"))
#> # A tibble: 4 × 6
#>   input         iso3c matched historical method   suggestion
#>   <chr>         <chr> <lgl>   <lgl>      <chr>    <chr>     
#> 1 USA           USA   TRUE    FALSE      regex_en NA        
#> 2 Cote d'Ivoire CIV   TRUE    FALSE      regex_en NA        
#> 3 Yugoslavia    NA    FALSE   TRUE       none     Yugoslavia
#> 4 Wakanda       NA    FALSE   FALSE      none     Canada    
# "USSR" matches (to RUS!) but is flagged historical:
check_country_match("USSR")
#> # A tibble: 1 × 6
#>   input iso3c matched historical method   suggestion
#>   <chr> <chr> <lgl>   <lgl>      <chr>    <chr>     
#> 1 USSR  RUS   TRUE    TRUE       regex_en NA