NEWS

states 0.3.2 (2023-09-05)

Several small fixes.

Manually add a "states-packge" alias for the package doc since roxygen2 does not do this by default anymore.
Switch from the deprecated ggplot2::aes_string() to ggplot2::aes() + the .data pronoun in plot_missing().
Fix a dplyr join warning in state_panel() due to the new "relationship" argument.
Update old URLs in README and other documentation.

Strip readr "spec" attribute from the cowstates and gwstates data. They are both now plain data frames with no attributes. (#22)
Expand list of short country names in prettyc(), e.g. instead of "Belarus (Byelorussia)", just "Belarus".
Move to testthat 3rd edition (3e).

all.equal() in R 4.1.x (R-devel at this point) will check environments for equivalence as well. This breaks one test since 2e testthat relies on all.equal() for expect_equal(). Moving to testthat 3e fixes this bug. (#26)

Although the original COW state list does not distinguish micro-states, like the G&W list does, the cowstates data now has a microstates coding derived from the G&W coding (#24). This makes it easier, for example, to filter out micro-states from a state panel dataset.
In the gwstates and cowstates data, the "iso3c" columns have been renamed to "gwn" and "cown", as they are not in fact ISO 3-character country abbreviations (#19).
plot_missing()'s "space" argument has been renamed "ccode".
id_date_sequence() now works with integer years, there is no need to convert them to Date class anymore (#20).

state_panel() has further improved support for input shortcuts (#3):

Accepted formats for the "start" and "end" arguments now include 2006, "2006", "2000-06", and "2006-06-01". See parse_date() for details.
The implied time period is now also inferred from shortcut input when "by" is left at the new default of NULL.
The "partial" option has gained new "first" and "last" values that also support shortcut input. Previously a shortcut input like 2006 could only be used with the "any" partial option, and to get country-years for states that were independent on the first day of a year one had to use state_panel("YYYY-01-01", partial = "exact", ...). This can now instead be done with state_panel(2006, partial = "first", ...).

Added country_names() to translate country codes to country names and prettyc() to shorten some of the longer country names, like "Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of".
Updated vignette on G&W and COW differences to take into account when trying to translate between codes.
Added compare() helper to compare two statelist data frames prior to merging.
Added parse_date() to handle more flexible "start" and "end" date input (#12).

Added option to use simpler input when generating a yearly panel, i.e. state_panel(2001, 2005) instead of state_panel("2001-01-01", "2005-01-01", by = "year", partial = "any").
Changed sfind() so that it ignores capitalization and treats character numbers as numbers. These pairs of queries now produce the same results, unlike before:
- "Gabon" and "gabon",
- 260 and "260"
Changes in plot_missing() and missing_info():
- make "data" the first argument and "x" the second argument so that it works nicer in pipes.
- add more intelligent defaults so that not all arguments have to be explicitly specified.
- rename the "time_unit" argument to "period".
- added "partial" argument, it works the same as in state_panel().
Fixed plot_missing() and missing_info() error when "data" is a tibble ("tbl_df").

plot_missing improvements: examples with Polity data, added a skip_labels option that will plot every n-th label for countries instead of all labels to avoid overplotting on the y-axis. The latter is inspired by https://github.com/xuyiqing/panelView.
Added Polity combined score as example data set.
Fixed encoding issue for gwstates$country_names like Cote d'Ivoire and Wüttemberg.

Initial version on CRAN.
Refactor state_panel and add a partial option to allow including partial state-periods (as opposed to the default which is based on the exact start date, for all period resolutions in "by").
Rework plot_missing: fix a bug that would leave out independent states with no cases in the input data; add missing_info function that generates the data underlying the plots.
Add pkgdown website for states package documentation.