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dialr

INFRA · APIS
Velocity0.0

Parse, Format, and Validate International Phone Numbers

github.com/socialresearchcentre/dialr ↗

The R phone-number package stopped only parsing numbers and started asking them where they are.

phone-numberslibphonenumberrjavar-packagevalidationgeocoding
◆Current state
dialr wraps Google's libphonenumber through rJava, giving R a phone vector class that parses, validates and formats international numbers. It has been quiet since August 2022, when the last release removed a pathology where Java would freeze after enough invalid inputs. The package covers parsing, validation, formatting, and the metadata lookups added in 0.3.0.
◆Where it's heading
Two forces shape the history. One is expansion into what libphonenumber knows beyond the number itself — carrier, geocode, timezone — which happened once, in 2019, and has not been extended since. The other is the ongoing cost of being a Java wrapper inside an R tidyverse: rJava initialisation moved so the :: form works, phone vectors reclassified when tibble 3.0.0 changed how it treats list-based classes, and repeated performance work to make crossing the Java boundary tolerable. The maintainer has floated moving the phone class onto vctrs but has not.
◆Prediction
The vctrs migration is the one change the maintainer has explicitly signalled, and the hard-deprecated one-shot functions were slated for removal in the next major release; three years of silence make neither imminent.

◆Recent moves

  1. 3y ago

    Invalid values short-circuit the Java parser, fixing a freeze

    Values that are not numbers at all — empty strings, NA — are now filtered before they reach the Java parser, which both speeds up bulk parsing sharply and fixes a freeze that hit after a large volume of invalid inputs. Progress bar visibility moves from a package-wide option to a per-call argument.

    View source ↗
  2. 5y ago

    Java initialises on load, so :: calls work without library()

    rJava initialisation moves to .onLoad(), so dialr::phone() finally works without a preceding library(dialr) — a real annoyance for a Java-backed package used inside other packages. The old one-shot processing functions become hard errors, with removal promised for the next major version.

    View source ↗
  3. 6y ago

    R 4.0 bump and tests decoupled from libphonenumber data

    An R 4.0.0 version bump plus tests rewritten to stop depending on specific libphonenumber data values, so upstream metadata updates no longer break the suite. Maintenance only.

    View source ↗
  4. 6y ago

    Phone vectors work in tibbles again after the 3.0.0 change

    Repairs phone vectors inside tibbles, broken by tibble 3.0.0's changed handling of list-based classes, by giving them the list class as the tibble changelog recommends. The maintainer notes vctrs as the eventual home for the class once it stabilises — a plan still unexecuted three years later.

    View source ↗
  5. 7y ago

    Carrier, geocode, and timezone lookups added

    ⚡ SPARK

    The release that widened the package's job. Until now dialr answered questions about a number's form — is it valid, what region, what type; from here it answers questions about the world behind the number. Nothing since has extended this surface, which makes it the high-water mark of the package's scope.

    View source ↗
  6. 7y ago

    Tenfold rJava speedup and proper phone equality

    Roughly tenfold speedups from more efficient rJava access and caching of static values — the recurring tax of calling Java from R. is_match() gives phone vectors a correct equality test and is wired into == and !=, and get_example() generates sample numbers per region and type.

    View source ↗