Auto-repair country names to their closest known match

The "act on it" companion to check_country_match(): replaces unmatched country names with their closest known country name (by string distance), but only when the match is confident enough, and reports what it changed. Pipe the result into standardize_country() / join_world().

Usage

repair_country_names(
  x,
  threshold = 0.2,
  origin = "country.name",
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

x

A vector of country names.

threshold

Maximum string distance to accept a repair (0 = identical, 1 = unrelated). Lower is stricter; default 0.2. Uses Jaro-Winkler when stringdist is installed, otherwise a length-normalised edit distance. The fallback repairs a subset of what Jaro-Winkler would: it charges two edits for a transposition, so at the default threshold "Germny" is repaired (one edit out of seven characters, 0.14) but "Frnace" is not (two out of six, 0.33). Jaro-Winkler scores that transposition 0.06 and repairs it.

Install stringdist if the repairs matter. The two metrics choose the nearest known name independently, so they can land on different countries, not merely on fewer of them: "Libia" is repaired to Liberia with stringdist and to Libya without it, and both are accepted at the default threshold. Neither metric is uniformly better – Jaro-Winkler also repairs "Maroco" to Monaco rather than Morocco – which is the real reason to check the reported substitutions rather than to trust either. verbose = TRUE (the default) prints them, and they are attached as the "repairs" attribute for programmatic checking.

origin

countrycode origin scheme (default "country.name").

verbose

Whether to message the substitutions made (default TRUE).

Value

A character vector the same length as x, with confident misses replaced by the closest known country name (others left unchanged). The applied substitutions are attached as the attribute "repairs".

See also

check_country_match() for the report this acts on, and dissolve_country() for dissolved entities, which are deliberately not repaired.

Examples

repair_country_names(c("United States", "Brzil", "Germny"))
#> ✔ Repaired 2 country names:
#> • "Brzil -> Brazil" and "Germny -> Germany"
#> [1] "United States" "Brazil"        "Germany"      
#> attr(,"repairs")
#> # A tibble: 2 × 2
#>   from   to     
#>   <chr>  <chr>  
#> 1 Brzil  Brazil 
#> 2 Germny Germany