Convert terms to standardized terms based on synonyms

Usage

fixnames_aliases(
  x,
  na_if_no_match = FALSE,
  alias_list = NULL,
  ignore.case = TRUE
)

Arguments

x: vector of terms, such as colnames(testpoints_10), etc.
na_if_no_match: optional, set to TRUE if you want it to return NA for each element of x not found in the alias_list info
alias_list: built-in already in source code (but can replace using this optional parameter), a list of named vectors where names are standard, preferred, canonical versions of terms, and each vector is a set of aliases for that term.
ignore.case: optional set to FALSE if you want to not ignore case

Value

character vector like x but where some or all may be replaced by standardized versions of the elements of x, or NA if appropriate

Details

fixcolnames_infer() and fixnames_aliases() are very similar.

fixcolnames_infer() is designed to figure out for a data.frame which one column is the best guess (top pick) for which should be used as the "lat" column, for example, so when several colnames are matches based on the alias_list, this function picks only one of them to rename to the preferred or canonical name, leaving others as-is.
In contrast to that, fixnames_aliases() is more general and every input element that can be matched with a canonical name gets changed to that preferred version, so even if multiple input names are different aliases of "lat", for example, they all get changed to "lat."

The alias_list could be for example this:


 alias_list <- list(
  sqkm = c('km2', 'kilometer2','kilometers2', 'sq kilometers', 'sq kilometer',
   'sqkilometers', 'sqkilometer',  'squarekilometers', 'squarekilometer',
   'square kilometers', 'square kilometer'),
  sqm = c('m2', 'meter2','meters2', 'sq meters', 'sq meter','sqmeters', 'sqmeter',
  'squaremeters', 'squaremeter', 'square meters', 'square meter'),
  mi = c('mile', 'miles'),

  lat = lat_alias,
  #[1]"lat" "latitude83" "latitude" "latitudes"  "faclat" "lats" "y"
  lon = lon_alias,
  #[1]"lon" "longitude83" "longitude" "longitudes" "faclong" "lons" "long" "longs" "lng" "x"

)

Examples

fixnames_aliases(c("km", "kilometer", "miles", "statename", 'X', "y"))
fixnames_aliases("LATITUDE")
fixnames_aliases("LATITUDE", ignore.case = F)
fixnames_aliases("LATITUDE", na_if_no_match = T)
fixnames_aliases("LATITUDE", na_if_no_match = T, ignore.case = F)
fixnames_aliases(c(NA, 1, "typo", 1:2, list()))

fixnames_aliases(c(1:4, "na", "tbd"), 
  alias_list = list(upto1 = 0:1, company = 2, crowd = 3:10, other = c("na", "tbd")))