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 is the more conservative of the two – it repairs a subset of what Jaro-Winkler would, mainly missing transposed letters ("Frnace"), and never picks a different country – so results can differ between machines depending on whether stringdist is available.

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