Look up the region or subregion for a country

Vectorised lookup from country name to world region or finer subregion, using the bundled country_region table. Matching is case-insensitive and whitespace-tolerant, and understands the spellings people type as well as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, so "USA", "U.S.", "us" and "United States" all resolve alike; blanks and non-answers (see na_blank()) become NA, and unmatched countries become NA with a one-line warning so spelling mismatches are easy to spot.

Usage

recode_region(x, which = c("region", "subregion"), quiet = FALSE)

recode_subregion(x, quiet = FALSE)

Arguments

x

A character vector of country names.

which

"region" (default) or "subregion".

quiet

If FALSE (default), warn about unmatched countries. Set TRUE to silence the warning.

Value

A character vector of regions (or subregions), NA where unmatched.

Details

A country column that people typed themselves is rarely tidy: in one real open salary survey, nine thousand respondents wrote "United States" and eight thousand wrote "USA". So the name is folded down before it is looked up – case, stray punctuation, accents and a leading "the" are all dropped – and then tried against the bundled country_region table (182 countries), then against a table of the spellings people actually use. That table carries endonyms ("Deutschland", "Brasil"), the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes ("US", "USA", "DE", "DEU"), so a column already coded to the standard needs no preparation at all.

A two-letter code is only read as a code when it was typed in capitals, because "NO" is Norway but "no" is an answer to a different question. Blanks and non-answers are blanked with na_blank() first, and anything still unmatched returns NA with a warning listing the offenders, so a spelling the table does not carry is easy to spot and add. Set quiet = TRUE inside pipelines where you have already checked the coverage. region is the coarse level (e.g. "Europe"); subregion is finer (e.g. "Western Europe").

See also

add_region(), country_region.

Other recode: add_region(), bin_numeric(), clean_label(), drop_items(), ensure_numeric(), generation_scheme(), na_blank(), nps_group(), recode_age(), recode_generation(), recode_likert(), split_multi()

Examples

recode_region(c("Germany", "Japan", "Brazil"))
#> [1] "Europe"        "Asia"          "South America"

# the spellings a free-text country question actually collects
recode_region(c("USA", "U.S.", "England", "Deutschland", "Holland"))
#> [1] "North America" "North America" "Europe"        "Europe"       
#> [5] "Europe"       

# a column already coded to ISO 3166-1
recode_region(c("US", "GBR", "DE", "JPN"))
#> [1] "North America" "Europe"        "Europe"        "Asia"         

recode_subregion(c("Germany", "Japan"))
#> [1] "Western Europe" "East Asia"     

# unmatched -> NA (warning suppressed here)
recode_region(c("Germany", "Atlantis"), quiet = TRUE)
#> [1] "Europe" NA