is_country {countries}

Tests whether a string is a country name

Description

This function checks whether the string is a country name. It supports different languages and naming conventions. The function returns TRUE if it relates to one of the 249 countries currently in the ISO standard 3166. Alternatively, the argument check_for allows to narrow down the test to a subset of countries. Fuzzy matching can be used to allow a small margin of error in the string.

Usage

is_country(x, check_for = NULL, fuzzy_match = FALSE)

Arguments

x

A character vector to be tested (also supports UN/ISO country codes)

check_for

A vector of country names to narrow down testing. The function will return TRUE only if the string relates to a country in this vector. Default is NULL.

fuzzy_match

A logical value indicating whether to tolerate small discrepancies in the country name matching. The default and fastest option is FALSE.

Value

Returns a logical vector indicating whether the string is a country name

See Also

match_table, country_name, find_countrycol

Examples

#Detect strings that are country names
is_country(x=c("ITA","Estados Unidos","Estado Unidos","bungalow","dog",542), fuzzy_match=FALSE)
is_country(x=c("ITA","Estados Unidos","Estado Unidos","bungalow","dog",542), fuzzy_match=TRUE)
#Checking for a specific subset of countries
is_country(x=c("Ceylon","LKA","Indonesia","Inde"), check_for=c("India","Sri Lanka"))