What Is New in stringi

1.7.7 (2022-07-02)

[DOCUMENTATION] Paper on stringi has been published in the Journal of Statistical Software; see https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v103.i02.
[BUGFIX] #473, #397: Fixed buffer overflow in stri_dup. stri_dup, stri_paste, … fail more graciously on attempts to generate strings of length >= 2^31 each.
[BUILD TIME] #480: Using Rf_isNull instead of isNull.
[DOCUMENTATION] #462: That the numeric=TRUE collator does not handle negative numbers correctly is now mentioned in the manual.

1.7.6 (2021-11-29)

[BUILD TIME] #463: Added loongarch support in ICU’s double conversion (@liuxiang88).
[BUGFIX] #467: The UCRT build on Windows was not marking strings as latin1.

1.7.5 (2021-10-04)

[DOCUMENTATION] Paper on stringi has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Statistical Software, see https://stringi.gagolewski.com/_static/vignette/stringi.pdf for a draft version.
[DOCUMENTATION] The stringi website at https://stringi.gagolewski.com now features a comprehensive tutorial based on the aforementioned paper.
[DOCUMENTATION] The ICU Project site has been moved to https://icu.unicode.org/.
[BUILD TIME] #457: The autoconf macros AC_LANG_CPLUSPLUS and AC_TRY_COMPILE were obsolete.
[BUGFIX] #458: Passing ALTREP objects no longer yields ‘embeded nul in string’ errors.

1.7.4 (2021-08-12)

[BUGFIX] #449: Fixed segfaults generated by stri_sprintf.
[BUILD TIME] No longer defining USE_RINTERNALS and R_NO_REMAP.

1.7.3 (2021-07-15)

[BUGFIX] Fixed the previous patch of ICU55 causing a build failure on, amongst others, CRAN’s Solaris-based target.

1.7.2 (2021-07-14)

[BUGFIX] Workaround for a bug in tools::checkFF failing when NA_character_ is passed to .Call.

1.7.1 (2021-07-14)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] %s$% and %stri$% now use the new stri_sprintf (see below) function instead of base::sprintf.
[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY, NEW FEATURE] In stri_sub<- and stri_sub_all<-, providing a negative length from now on does not result in the corresponding input string being altered.
[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY, NEW FEATURE] In stri_sub and stri_sub_all, negative length results in the corresponding output being NA or not extracted at all, depending on the setting of the new argument ignore_negative_length.
[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY, BUGFIX, NEW FEATURE] In stri_subset* and their replacement versions, pattern and value cannot be longer than str (but now they are recycled if necessary).
[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY, NEW FEATURE] stri_sub* now accept the from argument being a matrix like cbind(from, length=length). Unnamed columns or any other names are still interpreted as cbind(from, to). Also, the new argument use_matrix can be used to disable the special treatment of such matrices.
[DOCUMENTATION] It has been clarified that the syntax of *_charclass (e.g., used in stri_trim*) differs slightly from regex character classes.
[NEW FEATURE] #420: stri_sprintf (alias: stri_string_format) is a Unicode-aware replacement for and enhancement of the base sprintf: it adds a customised handling of NAs (on demand), computing field size based on code point width, outputting substrings of at most given width, variable width and precision (both at the same time), etc. Moreover, stri_printf can be used to display formatted strings conveniently.
[NEW FEATURE] #153: stri_match_*_regex now extract capture group names.
[NEW FEATURE] #25: stri_locate_*_regex now have a new argument, capture_groups, which allows for extracting positions of matches to parenthesised subexpressions.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_locate_* now have a new argument, get_length, whose setting may result in generating from-length matrices (instead of from-to ones).
[NEW FEATURE] #438: stri_trans_general now supports rule-based as well as reverse-direction transliteration.
[NEW FEATURE] #434: stri_datetime_format and stri_datetime_parse are now vectorised also with respect to the format argument.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_datetime_fstr has a new argument, ignore_special, which defaults to TRUE for backward compatibility.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_datetime_format, stri_datetime_add, and stri_datetime_fields now call as.POSIXct more eagerly.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_trim* now have a new argument, negate.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_replace_rstr converts gsub-style replacement strings to stri_replace-style.
[INTERNAL] stri_prepare_arg* have been refactored, buffer overruns in the exception handling subsystem are now avoided.
[BUGFIX] Few functions (stri_length, stri_enc_toutf32, etc.) did not throw an exception on an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence (and merely issued a warning instead).
[BUGFIX] stri_datetime_fstr did not honour NA_character_ and did not parse format strings such as "%Y%m%d" correctly. It has now been completely rewritten (in C).
[BUGFIX] stri_wrap did not recognise the width of certain Unicode sequences correctly.

1.6.2 (2021-05-14)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] In stri_enc_list(), simplify now defaults to TRUE.
[NEW FEATURE] #425: The outputs of stri_enc_list(), stri_locale_list(), stri_timezone_list(), and stri_trans_list() are now sorted.
[NEW FEATURE] #428: In stri_flatten, na_empty=NA now omits missing values.
[BUILD TIME] #431: Pre-4.9.0 GCC has ::max_align_t, but not std::max_align_t, added a (possible) workaround, see the INSTALL file.
[BUGFIX] #429: stri_width() misclassified the width of certain code points (including grave accent, Eszett, etc.); General category Sk (Symbol, modifier) is no longer of width 0, UCHAR_EAST_ASIAN_WIDTH of U_EA_AMBIGUOUS is no longer of width 2.
[BUGFIX] #354: ALTREP CHARSXPs were not copied, and thus could have been garbage collected in the so-called meanwhile (with thanks to @jimhester).

1.6.1 (2021-05-05)

[GENERAL] #401: stringi is now bundled with ICU4C 69.1 (upgraded from 61.1), which is used on most Windows and OS X builds as well as on *nix systems not equipped with system ICU. However, if the C++11 support is disabled, stringi will be built against the battle-tested ICU4C 55.1. The update to ICU brings Unicode 13.0 and CLDR 39 support.
[DOCUMENTATION] A draft version of a paper on stringi is now available at https://stringi.gagolewski.com/_static/vignette/stringi.pdf.
[GENERAL] stringi now requires R >= 3.1 (CXX_STD of CXX11 or CXX1X).
[NEW FEATURE] #408: stri_trans_casefold() performs case folding; this is different from case mapping, which is locale-dependent. Folding makes two pieces of text that differ only in case identical. This can come in handy when comparing strings.
[NEW FEATURE] #421: stri_rank() ranks strings in a character vector (e.g., for ordering data frames with regards to multiple criteria, the ranks can be passed to order(), see #219).
[NEW FEATURE] #266: stri_width() now supports emojis.
[NEW FEATURE] %s$% and %stri$% are now vectorised with respect to both arguments.
[BUGFIX] stri_sort_key() now outputs bytes-encoded strings.
[BUGFIX] #415: locale='' was not equivalent to locale=NULL in stri_opts_collator().
[INTERNAL] #414: Use LEVELS(x) macro instead of accessing (x)->sxpinfo.gp directly (@lukaszdaniel).

1.5.3 (2020-09-04)

[DOCUMENTATION] stringi home page has moved to https://stringi.gagolewski.com and now includes a comprehensive reference manual.
[NEW FEATURE] #400: %s$% and %stri$% are now binary operators that call base R’s sprintf().
[NEW FEATURE] #399: The %s*% and %stri*% operators can be used in addition to stri_dup(), for the very same purpose.
[NEW FEATURE] #355: stri_opts_regex() now accepts the time_limit and stack_limit options so as to prevent malformed or malicious regexes from running for too long.
[NEW FEATURE] #345: stri_startswith() and stri_endswith() are now equipped with the negate parameter.
[NEW FEATURE] #382: Incorrect regexes are now reported to ease debugging.
[DEPRECATION WARNING] #347: Any unknown option passed to stri_opts_fixed(), stri_opts_regex(), stri_opts_coll(), and stri_opts_brkiter() now generates a warning. In the future, the ... parameter will be removed, so that will be an error.
[DEPRECATION WARNING] stri_duplicated()’s fromLast argument has been renamed from_last. fromLast is now its alias scheduled for removal in a future version of the package.
[DEPRECATION WARNING] stri_enc_detect2() is scheduled for removal in a future version of the package. Use stri_enc_detect() or the more targeted stri_enc_isutf8(), stri_enc_isascii(), etc., instead.
[DEPRECATION WARNING] stri_read_lines(), stri_write_lines(), stri_read_raw(): use con argument instead of fname now. The argument fallback_encoding is scheduled for removal and is no longer used. stri_read_lines() does not support encoding="auto" anymore.
[DEPRECATION WARNING] nparagraphs in stri_rand_lipsum() has been renamed n_paragraphs.
[NEW FEATURE] #398: Alternative, British spelling of function parameters has been introduced, e.g., stri_opts_coll() now supports both normalization and normalisation.
[NEW FEATURE] #393: stri_read_bin(), stri_read_lines(), and stri_write_lines() are no longer marked as draft API.
[NEW FEATURE] #187: stri_read_bin(), stri_read_lines(), and stri_write_lines() now support connection objects as well.
[NEW FEATURE] #386: New function stri_sort_key() for generating locale-dependent sort keys which can be ordered at the byte level and return an equivalent ordering to the original string (@DavisVaughan).
[BUGFIX] #138: stri_encode() and stri_rand_strings() now can generate strings of much larger lengths.
[BUGFIX] stri_wrap() did not honour indent correctly when use_width was TRUE.

1.4.6 (2020-02-17)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] #369: stri_c() now returns an empty string when input is empty and collapse is set.
[BUGFIX] #370: fixed an issue in stri_prepare_arg_POSIXct() reported by rchk.
[DOCUMENTATION] #372: documented arguments not in \usage in documentation object stri_datetime_format: ...

1.4.5 (2020-01-11)

[BUGFIX] #366: fix for #363 required ICU >= 55 .

1.4.4 (2020-01-06)

[BUGFIX] #348: Avoid copying 0 bytes to a nil-buffer in stri_sub_all().
[BUGFIX] #362: Removed configure variable CXXCPP as it is now deprecated.
[BUGFIX] #318: PROTECTing objects from gcing as reported by rchk.
[BUGFIX] #344, #364: Removed compiler warnings in icu61/common/cstring.h.
[BUGFIX] #363: Status of RegexMatcher is now checked after its use.

1.4.3 (2019-03-12)

[NEW FEATURE] #30: New function stri_sub_all() - a version of stri_sub() accepting list from/to/length arguments for extracting multiple substrings from each string in a character vector.
[NEW FEATURE] #30: New function stri_sub_all<-() (and its %<%-friendly version, stri_sub_replace_all()) - for replacing multiple substrings with corresponding replacement strings.
[NEW FEATURE] In stri_sub_replace(), value parameter has a new alias, replacement.
[NEW FEATURE] New convenience functions based on stri_remove_empty(): stri_omit_empty_na(), stri_remove_empty_na(), stri_omit_empty(), and also stri_remove_na(), stri_omit_na().
[BUGFIX] #343: stri_trans_char() did not yield correct results for overlapping pattern and replacement strings.
[WARNFIX] #205: configure.ac is now included in the source bundle.

1.3.1 (2019-02-10)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] #335: A fix to #314 prevented (by design) the use of the system ICU if the library had been compiled with U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8=1. However, this is the default setting in libicu>=61. From now on, in such cases the system ICU is used more eagerly, but stri_enc_set() issues a warning stating that the default (UTF-8) encoding cannot be changed.
[NEW FEATURE] #232: All stri_detect_* functions now have the max_count argument that allows for, e.g., stopping at the first pattern occurrence.
[NEW FEATURE] #338: stri_sub_replace() is now an alias for stri_sub<-() which makes it much more easily pipable (@yutannihilation, @BastienFR).
[NEW FEATURE] #334: Added missing icudt61b.dat to support big-endian platforms (thanks to Dimitri John Ledkov @xnox).
[BUGFIX] #296: Out-of-the box build used to fail on CentOS 6, upgraded configure to --disable-cxx11 more eagerly at an early stage.
[BUGFIX] #341: Fixed possible buffer overflows when calling strncpy() from within ICU 61.
[BUGFIX] #325: Made configure more portable so that it works under /bin/dash now.
[BUGFIX] #319: Fixed overflow in stri_rand_shuffle().
[BUGFIX] #337: Empty search patterns in search functions (e.g., stri_split_regex() and stri_count_fixed()) used to raise too many warnings on empty search patterns.

1.2.4 (2018-07-20)

[BUGFIX] #314: Testing U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8 in configure when using pkg-build.
[BUILD TIME] #317: Included icudt61l.zip in the source bundle to solve the frequent icudt download failed error (also on CRAN’s windows-release and windows-oldrel). (reverted in version 1.3.1, the winbuilder errors were caused by a build chain bug).

1.2.3 (2018-05-16)

[BUGFIX] #296: Fixed the behaviour of the configure script on CentOS 6.
[BUGFIX] Fixed broken Windows build by updating the icudt mirror list.

1.2.2 (2018-05-01)

[GENERAL] #193: stringi is now bundled with ICU4C 61.1, which is used on most Windows and OS X builds as well as on *nix systems not equipped with ICU. However, if the C++11 support is disabled, stringi will be built against ICU4C 55.1. The update to ICU brings Unicode 10.0 support, including new emoji characters.
[BUGFIX] #288: stri_match() did not return the correct number of columns when input was empty.
[NEW FEATURE] #188: stri_enc_detect() now returns a list of data frames.
[NEW FEATURE] #289: stri_flatten() how has na_empty and omit_empty arguments.
[NEW FEATURE] New functions: stri_remove_empty(), stri_na2empty().
[NEW FEATURE] #285: Coercion from a non-trivial list (one that consists of atomic vectors, each of length 1) to an atomic vector now issues a warning.
[WARN] Removed -Wparentheses warnings in icu55/common/cstring.h:38:63 and icu55/i18n/windtfmt.cpp in the ICU4C 55.1 bundle.

1.1.7 (2018-03-06)

[BUGFIX] Fixed ICU4C 55.1 generating some significant warnings (icu55/i18n/winnmfmt.cpp) and suppressing important diagnostics (src/icu55/i18n/decNumber.c).

1.1.6 (2017-11-10)

[WINDOWS SPECIFIC] #270: Strings marked with latin1 encoding are now converted internally to UTF-8 using the WINDOWS-1252 codec. This fixes problems with - among others - displaying the Euro sign.
[NEW FEATURE] #263: Added support for custom rule-based break iteration, see ?stri_opts_brkiter.
[NEW FEATURE] #267: omit_na=TRUE in stri_sub<-() now ignores missing values in any of the arguments provided.
[BUGFIX] Fixed unPROTECTed variable names and stack imbalances as reported by rchk.

1.1.5 (2017-04-07)

[GENERAL] stringi now requires ICU4C >= 52.
[BUGFIX] Fixed errors pointed out by clang-UBSAN in stri_brkiter.h.
[GENERAL] stringi now requires R >= 2.14.
[BUILD TIME] #238, #220: Now trying standard ICU4C build flags if a call to pkg-config fails.
[BUILD TIME] #258: Use CXX11 instead of CXX1X on R >= 3.4.
[BUILD TIME, BUGFIX] #254: dir.exists() is R >= 3.2.

1.1.3 (2017-03-21)

[REMOVE DEPRECATED] stri_install_check() and stri_install_icudt() marked as deprecated in stringi 0.5-5 are no longer being exported.
[BUGFIX] #227: Incorrect behaviour of stri_sub() and stri_sub<-() if the empty string was the result.
[BUILD TIME] #231: The configure (Linux/Unix only) script now reads the following environment variables: STRINGI_CFLAGS, STRINGI_CPPFLAGS, STRINGI_CXXFLAGS, STRINGI_LDFLAGS, STRINGI_LIBS, STRINGI_DISABLE_CXX11, STRINGI_DISABLE_ICU_BUNDLE, STRINGI_DISABLE_PKG_CONFIG, PKG_CONFIG, see INSTALL for more information.
[BUILD TIME] #253: Call to R_useDynamicSymbols() added.
[BUILD TIME] #230: icudt is now being downloaded by configure (*NIX only) before building.
[BUILD TIME] #242: _COUNT/_LIMIT enum constants have been deprecated as of ICU 58.2, stringi code has been upgraded accordingly.

1.1.2 (2016-09-30)

[BUGFIX] round(), snprintf() is not C++98.

1.1.1 (2016-05-25)

[BUGFIX] #214: Allow a regex pattern like .* to match an empty string.
[BUGFIX] #210: stri_replace_all_fixed(c("1", "NULL"), "NULL", NA) now results in c("1", NA).
[NEW FEATURE] #199: stri_sub<-() now allows for ignoring NA locations (a new omit_na argument added).
[NEW FEATURE] #207: stri_sub<-() now allows for substring insertions (via length=0).
[NEW FUNCTION] #124: stri_subset<-() functions added.
[NEW FEATURE] #216: stri_detect(), stri_subset(), stri_subset<-() now all have the negate argument.
[NEW FUNCTION] #175: stri_join_list() concatenates all strings in a list of character vectors. Useful in conjunction with, e.g., stri_extract_all_regex(), stri_extract_all_words(), etc.

1.0-1 (2015-10-22)

[GENERAL] #88: C API is now available for use in, e.g., Rcpp packages, see https://github.com/gagolews/ExampleRcppStringi for an example.
[BUGFIX] #183: Floating point exception raised in stri_sub() and stri_sub<-() when to or length was a zero-length numeric vector.
[BUGFIX] #180: stri_c() warned incorrectly (recycling rule) when using more than two elements.

0.5-5 (2015-06-28)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] stri_install_check() and stri_install_icudt() are now deprecated. From now on they are supposed to be used only by the stringi installer.
[BUGFIX] #176: A patch for sys/feature_tests.h no longer included (the original file was copyrighted by Sun Microsystems); fixed the Compiler or options invalid for pre-Unix 03 X/Open applications and pre-2001 POSIX applications error by forcing (conditionally) _XPG6 conformance.
[BUGFIX] #174: stri_paste() did not generate any warning when the recycling rule is violated and sep=="".
[BUGFIX] #170: icu::setDataDirectory is no longer called if our ICU source bundle is not used (this used to cause build problems on openSUSE).
[BUILD TIME] #169: configure now tries to switch to the standard C++ compiler if a C++11 one is not configured correctly.
[BUILD TIME] configure.win (Biarch: TRUE) now mimics autoconf’s AC_SUBST and AC_CONFIG_FILES so that the build process is now more similar across different platforms.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_info() now also gives information about which version of ICU4C is in use (system or bundle).

0.5-2 (2015-06-21)

[BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] The second argument to stri_pad_*() has been renamed width.
[GENERAL] #69: stringi is now bundled with ICU4C 55.1.
[NEW FUNCTIONS] stri_extract_*_boundaries() extract text between text boundaries.
[NEW FUNCTION] #46: stri_trans_char() is a stringi-flavoured chartr() equivalent.
[NEW FUNCTION] #8: stri_width() approximates the width of a string in a more Unicode-ish fashion than nchar(..., "width")
[NEW FEATURE] #149: stri_pad() and stri_wrap() is now (by default) based on code point widths instead of the number of code points. Moreover, the default behaviour of stri_wrap() is now such that it does not get rid of non-breaking, zero width, etc., spaces.
[NEW FEATURE] #133: stri_wrap() silently allows for width <= 0 (for compatibility with strwrap()).
[NEW FEATURE] #139: stri_wrap() gained a new argument: whitespace_only.
[NEW FUNCTIONS] #137: Date-time formatting/parsing:
- stri_timezone_list() - lists all known time zone identifiers;
- stri_timezone_set(), stri_timezone_get() - manage the current default time zone;
- stri_timezone_info() - basic information on a given time zone;
- stri_datetime_symbols() - gives localizable date-time formatting data;
- stri_datetime_fstr() - converts a strptime-like format string to an ICU date/time format string;
- stri_datetime_format() - converts date/time to string;
- stri_datetime_parse() - converts string to date/time object;
- stri_datetime_create() - constructs date-time objects from numeric representations;
- stri_datetime_now() - returns current date-time;
- stri_datetime_fields() - returns date-time fields’ values;
- stri_datetime_add() - adds specific number of date-time units to a date-time object.
[GENERAL] #144: Performance improvements in handling ASCII strings (these affect stri_sub(), stri_locate() and other string index-based operations)
[GENERAL] #143: Searching for short fixed patterns (stri_*_fixed()) now relies on the current libC’s implementation of strchr() and strstr(). This is very fast, e.g., on glibc using the SSE2/3/4 instruction set.
[BUILD TIME] #141: A local copy of icudt*.zip may be used on package install; see the INSTALL file for more information.
[BUILD TIME] #165: The configure option --disable-icu-bundle forces the use of system ICU when building the package.
[BUGFIX] Locale specifiers are now normalized in a more intelligent way: e.g., @calendar=gregorian expands to DEFAULT_LOCALE@calendar=gregorian.
[BUGFIX] #134: stri_extract_all_words() did not accept simplify=NA.
[BUGFIX] #132: Incorrect behaviour in stri_locate_regex() for matches of zero lengths.
[BUGFIX] stringr/#73: stri_wrap() returned CHARSXP instead of STRSXP on empty string input with simplify=FALSE argument.
[BUGFIX] #164: Using libicu-dev failed on Ubuntu (LIBS shall be passed after LDFLAGS and the list of .o files).
[BUGFIX] #168: Build now fails if icudt is not available.
[BUGFIX] #135: C++11 is now used by default (see the INSTALL file, however) to build stringi from sources. This is because ICU4C uses the long long type which is not part of the C++98 standard.
[BUGFIX] #154: Dates and other objects with a custom class attribute were not coerced to the character type correctly.
[BUGFIX] Force ICU u_init() call on the stringi dynlib load.
[BUGFIX] #157: Many overfull hboxes in the package PDF manual have been corrected.

0.4-1 (2014-12-11)

[IMPORTANT CHANGE] n_max argument in stri_split_*() has been renamed n.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] simplify=FALSE in stri_extract_all_*() and stri_split_*() now calls stri_list2matrix() with fill="". fill=NA_character_ may be obtained by using simplify=NA.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE, NEW FUNCTIONS] #120: stri_extract_words() has been renamed stri_extract_all_words() and stri_locate_boundaries() - stri_locate_all_boundaries() as well as stri_locate_words() - stri_locate_all_words(). New functions are now available: stri_locate_first_boundaries(), stri_locate_last_boundaries(), stri_locate_first_words(), stri_locate_last_words(), stri_extract_first_words(), stri_extract_last_words().
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] #111: opts_regex, opts_collator, opts_fixed, and opts_brkiter can now be supplied individually via .... In other words, you may now simply call, e.g., stri_detect_regex(str, pattern, case_insensitive=TRUE) instead of stri_detect_regex(str, pattern, opts_regex=stri_opts_regex(case_insensitive=TRUE)).
[NEW FEATURE] #110: Fixed pattern search engine’s settings can now be supplied via opts_fixed argument in stri_*_fixed(), see stri_opts_fixed(). A simple (not suitable for natural language processing) yet very fast case_insensitive pattern matching can be performed now. stri_extract_*_fixed() is again available.
[NEW FEATURE] #23: stri_extract_all_fixed(), stri_count(), and stri_locate_all_fixed() may now also look for overlapping pattern matches, see ?stri_opts_fixed.
[NEW FEATURE] #129: stri_match_*_regex() gained a cg_missing argument.
[NEW FEATURE] #117: stri_extract_all_*(), stri_locate_all_*(), stri_match_all_*() gained a new argument: omit_no_match. Setting it to TRUE makes these functions compatible with their stringr equivalents.
[NEW FEATURE] #118: stri_wrap() gained indent, exdent, initial, and prefix arguments. Moreover, Knuth’s dynamic word wrapping algorithm now assumes that the cost of printing the last line is zero, see #128.
[NEW FEATURE] #122: stri_subset() gained an omit_na argument.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_list2matrix() gained an n_min argument.
[NEW FEATURE] #126: stri_split() is now also able to act just like stringr::str_split_fixed().
[NEW FEATURE] #119: stri_split_boundaries() now has n, tokens_only, and simplify arguments. Additionally, stri_extract_all_words() is now equipped with simplify arg.
[NEW FEATURE] #116: stri_paste() gained a new argument: ignore_null. Setting it to TRUE makes this function more compatible with paste().
[OTHER] #123: useDynLib is used to speed up symbol look-up in the compiled dynamic library.
[BUGFIX] #114: stri_paste(): could return result in an incorrect order.
[BUGFIX] #94: Run-time errors on Solaris caused by setting -DU_DISABLE_RENAMING=1 - memory allocation errors in, among others, the ICU UnicodeString. This setting also caused some ASAN sanity check failures within ICU code.

0.3-1 (2014-11-06)

[IMPORTANT CHANGE] #87: %>% overlapped with the pipe operator from the magrittr package; now each operator like %>% has been renamed %s>%.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] #108: Now the BreakIterator (for text boundary analysis) may be more easily controlled via stri_opts_brkiter() (see options type and locale which aim to replace now-removed boundary and locale parameters to stri_locate_boundaries(), stri_split_boundaries(), stri_trans_totitle(), stri_extract_words(), and stri_locate_words()).
[NEW FUNCTIONS] #109: stri_count_boundaries() and stri_count_words() count the number of text boundaries in a string.
[NEW FUNCTIONS] #41: stri_startswith_*() and stri_endswith_*() determine whether a string starts or ends with a given pattern.
[NEW FEATURE] #102: stri_replace_all_*() now all have the vectorize_all parameter, which defaults to TRUE for backward compatibility.
[NEW FUNCTION] #91: Added stri_subset_*() - a convenient and more efficient substitute for str[stri_detect_*(str, ...)].
[NEW FEATURE] #100: stri_split_fixed(), stri_split_charclass(), stri_split_regex(), stri_split_coll() gained a tokens_only parameter, which defaults to FALSE for backward compatibility.
[NEW FUNCTION] #105: stri_list2matrix() converts lists of atomic vectors to character matrices, useful in conjunction with stri_split() and stri_extract().
[NEW FEATURE] #107: stri_split_*() now allow setting an omit_empty=NA argument.
[NEW FEATURE] #106: stri_split() and stri_extract_all() gained a simplify argument (if TRUE, then stri_list2matrix(..., byrow=TRUE) is called on the resulting list).
[NEW FUNCTION] #77: stri_rand_lipsum() generates a (pseudo)random dummy lorem ipsum text.
[NEW FEATURE] #98: stri_trans_totitle() gained a opts_brkiter parameter; it indicates which ICU BreakIterator should be used when case mapping.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_wrap() gained a new parameter: normalize.
[BUGFIX] #86: stri_*_fixed(), stri_*_coll(), and stri_*_regex() could give incorrect results if one of search strings were of length 0.
[BUGFIX] #99: stri_replace_all() did not use the replacement arg.
[BUGFIX] #112: Some of the objects were not PROTECTed from garbage collection - this could have led to spontaneous SEGFAULTS.
[BUGFIX] Some collator’s options were not passed correctly to ICU services.
[BUGFIX] Memory leaks as detected by valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full have been removed.
[DOCUMENTATION] Significant extensions/clean ups in the stringi manual.

0.2-5 (2014-05-16)

Some examples are no longer run if icudt is not available (this was reverted in a future version though).

0.2-4 (2014-05-15)

[BUGFIX] Fixed issues with loading of misaligned addresses in stri_*_fixed().

0.2-3 (2014-05-14)

[IMPORTANT CHANGE] stri_cmp*() now do not allow for passing opts_collator=NA. From now on, stri_cmp_eq(), stri_cmp_neq(), and the new operators %===%, %!==%, %stri===%, and %stri!==% are locale-independent operations, which base on code point comparisons. New functions stri_cmp_equiv() and stri_cmp_nequiv() (and from now on also %==%, %!=%, %stri==%, and %stri!=%) test for canonical equivalence.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] stri_*_fixed() search functions now perform a locale-independent exact (byte-wise, of course after conversion to UTF-8) pattern search. All the Collator-based, locale-dependent search routines are now available via stri_*_coll(). The reason behind this is that ICU’s USearch has currently very poor performance. What is more, in many search tasks exact pattern matching is sufficient anyway.
[GENERAL] stri_*_fixed now use a tweaked Knuth-Morris-Pratt search algorithm which improves the search performance drastically.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] stri_enc_nf*() and stri_enc_isnf*() function families have been renamed stri_trans_nf*() and stri_trans_isnf*(), respectively – they deal with text transforming, and not with character encoding. Note that all of these may be performed by ICU’s Transliterator too (see below).
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_trans_general() and stri_trans_list() give access to ICU’s Transliterator: they may be used to perform some generic text transforms, like Unicode normalisation, case folding, etc.
[NEW FUNCTION stri_split_boundaries() uses ICU’s BreakIterator to split strings at specific text boundaries. Moreover, stri_locate_boundaries() indicates positions of these boundaries.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_extract_words() uses ICU’s BreakIterator to extract all words from a text. Additionally, stri_locate_words() locates start and end positions of words in a text.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_pad(), stri_pad_left(), stri_pad_right(), and stri_pad_both() pad a string with a specific code point.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_wrap() breaks paragraphs of text into lines. Two algorithms (greedy and minimal raggedness) are available.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] stri_*_charclass() search functions now rely solely on ICU’s UnicodeSet patterns. All the previously accepted charclass identifiers became invalid. However, new patterns should now be more familiar to the users (they are regex-like). Moreover, we observe a very nice performance gain.
[IMPORTANT CHANGE] stri_sort() now does not include NAs in output vectors by default, for compatibility with sort(). Moreover, currently none of the input vector’s attributes are preserved.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_unique() extracts unique elements from a character vector.
[NEW FUNCTIONS] stri_duplicated() and stri_duplicated_any() determine duplicate elements in a character vector.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_replace_na() replaces NAs in a character vector with a given string, useful for emulating, e.g., R’s paste() behaviour.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_rand_shuffle() generates a random permutation of code points in a string.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_rand_strings() generates random strings.
[NEW FUNCTIONS] New functions and binary operators for string comparison: stri_cmp_eq(), stri_cmp_neq(), stri_cmp_lt(), stri_cmp_le(), stri_cmp_gt(), stri_cmp_ge(), %==%, %!=%, %<%, %<=%, %>%, %>=%.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_enc_mark() reads declared encodings of character strings as seen by stringi.
[NEW FUNCTION] stri_enc_tonative(str) is an alias to stri_encode(str, NULL, NULL).
[NEW FEATURE] stri_order() and stri_sort() now have an additional argument na_last (defaults to TRUE and NA, respectively).
[NEW FEATURE] stri_replace_all_charclass(), stri_extract_all_charclass(), and stri_locate_all_charclass() now have a new argument, merge (defaults to FALSE for backward-compatibility). It may be used to, e.g., replace sequences of white spaces with a single space.
[NEW FEATURE] stri_enc_toutf8() now has a new validate argument (which defaults to FALSE for backward-compatibility). It may be used in a (rare) case where a user wants to fix an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence. stri_length() (among others) now detects invalid UTF-8 byte sequences.
[NEW FEATURE] All binary operators %???% now also have aliases %stri???%.
[GENERAL] Performance improvements in StriContainerUTF8 and StriContainerUTF16 (they affect most other functions).
[GENERAL] Significant performance improvements in stri_join(), stri_flatten(), stri_cmp(), stri_trans_to*(), and others.
[GENERAL] Added 3rd mirror site for our icudt binary distribution.
U_MISSING_RESOURCE_ERROR message in StriException now suggests calling stri_install_check().
[BUGFIX] UTF-8 BOMs are now silently removed from input strings.
[BUGFIX] No more attempts to re-encode UTF-8 encoded strings if native encoding is UTF-8 in StriContainerUTF8.
[BUGFIX] Possible memory leaks when throwing errors via Rf_error().
[BUGFIX] stri_order() and stri_cmp() could return incorrect results for opts_collator=NA.
[BUGFIX] stri_sort() did not guarantee to return strings in UTF-8.

0.1-25 (2014-03-12)

LICENSE tweaks.
First CRAN release.

0.1-24 (2014-03-11)

Fixed bugs detected with ASAN and UBSAN, e.g., fixed CharClass::gcmask type (enum -> uint32_t) (reported by UBSAN).
Fixed array over-runs detected with valgrind in string8.h.
Fixed uninitialised class fields in StriContainerUTF8 (reported by valgrind).

0.1-23 (2014-03-11)

License changed to BSD-3-clause, COPYRIGHTS updated.
icudt is not shipped with stringi anymore; it is now downloaded in install.libs.R from one of our servers.
New functions: stri_install_check(), stri_install_icudt().

0.1-22 (2014-02-20)

System ICU is used on systems which do have one (version >= 50 needed). ICU is auto-detected with pkg-config in configure. Pass '--disable-pkg-config' to configure to force building ICU from sources.
icudt52b (custom subset) is now shipped with stringi (for big-endian, ASCII systems).

0.1-21 (2014-02-19)

Fixed some issues on Solaris while preparing stringi for CRAN submission.

0.1-20 (2014-02-17)

ICU4C 52.1 sources included (common, i18n, stubdata + icu52dt.dat loaded dynamically). Compilation via Makevars.
stringi does not depend on any external libraries anymore.

0.1-11 (2013-11-16)

ICU4C is now statically linked on Windows.
First OS X binary build.
The package is being intensively tested by our students at Warsaw University of Technology.

0.1-10 (2013-11-13)

Using pkg-config via configure to look for ICU4C libs.

0.1-6 (2013-07-05)

First Windows binary build.
Compilation passed on Oracle Sun Studio compiler collection.
By now we have implemented most of the functionality scheduled for milestone 0.1.

0.1-1 (2013-01-05)

The stringi project has been started.