Auto-repair country names to their closest known match — repair_country

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.
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".

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