Changelog • pressfreedom.data

pressfreedom.data (development version)

CRAN release: 2026-08-24

Unified column rename mechanism: RSF periodically renames columns in their exports (e.g., 2025–2026: “Score” → “Score 2025”/“Score 2026”). All such renames now flow through a single, transparent override system (inst/extdata/period3_column_overrides.csv + three validation/override functions) instead of special-cased detection logic. This makes future RSF format changes maintainable without code edits — just append a row to the CSV. Includes three new safety net functions for per-column validation, override loading, and mapping patching.
Improved encoding robustness: Each raw RSF CSV is now scanned per-file for encoding (UTF-8 vs. ISO-8859-1 inherited from RSF’s silent 2025 switch), preventing mojibake that would otherwise propagate silently into RDS datasets. Detection happens at download time; data are converted to UTF-8 during cleaning.

Removed detect_score_column() function (functionality moved to override mechanism, making score renames no longer special).
Simplified normalize_column_names() signature: dropped unused period and year parameters. Function now does pure mechanical rename/reorder; all period/year-specific logic moved to caller. This removes ~22 lines of code and clarifies the API boundary.
Test harness: suppressed console output from validation failure-case tests, so only “All validation checks passed!” appears in R CMD check output, avoiding false suspicion of package issues during CRAN review.

Addressed all feedback from CRAN v0.2.0 rejection (Aug 8, 2026): DESCRIPTION URL, print method documentation, removal of unexported function examples, elimination of \dontrun{}, replacement of cat() with message(), removal of package-relative path defaults from internal functions.

ETL/update functions (download_rwb_data(), clean_rwb_single(), clean_all_rwb_years(), combine_cleaned_periods(), standardize_rwb_countries(), update_rwb_data(), and related internal helpers) are no longer exported. They rely on a development checkout (here::here() paths, git operations) and were never usable from an installed copy of the package. The public API is now just the rwb_standardized dataset. Use pressfreedom.data:::fun() if you still need direct access.
zone now uses English region names instead of RSF’s original French labels, e.g. "MENA" -> "Middle East & North Africa", "Afrique" -> "Africa". Update any code that filters or joins on the old French values (see ?rwb_standardized for the full mapping). This also fixes a recurring zone mojibake/encoding issue.
Fixed score_n_1 for 2023-2026 (720 rows), which was about 100x too large (e.g. 9265 instead of 92.65) due to a missing decimal-scaling step. It’s now on the same 0-100 scale as score. Remove any manual rescaling workaround for these years.

Clarified the rwb_ naming convention (RSF vs. RWB) in ?rwb_standardized.
De-duplicated content between README.md and vignette("getting-started"); consolidated citation info into inst/CITATION.
Added a \value tag to print.rwb_update()’s documentation and cited the RSF web service in the Description: field, addressing CRAN feedback on the initial 0.2.0 submission.

Removed \examples from the unexported helpers download_rwb_data(), get_period(), and get_years_to_download() rather than exporting them, eliminating the package’s only \dontrun{} usage.
download_rwb_data() now uses message() instead of unconditional cat() for progress/summary output, so it can be suppressed with suppressMessages().
Removed package-relative default paths (e.g. "inst/extdata", here::here("data", "cleaned")) from download_rwb_data(), get_years_to_download(), clean_rwb_single(), clean_all_rwb_years(), combine_cleaned_periods(), and standardize_rwb_countries(). These arguments are now required with no default, so the functions never write to (or read from) a package or home directory implicitly.

New hex sticker logo, redesigned to be visually distinct from the companion pressfreedom Shiny app’s logo.