stringi: Fast and portable character string processing in R

1.8.1 (2023-11-09)

• [GENERAL] ICU bundle updated to version 74.1 (Unicode 15.1, CLDR 44).

• [BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] [BUILD TIME] Support for Solaris has now been dropped. The package is no longer shipped with the very outdated ICU55 bundle. A compiler supporting at least C++11 as well as ICU >= 61 are now required.

• [BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] #469: Missing date-time fields in stri_datetime_parse and stri_datetime_create now default to today's midnight local time.

• [BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITY] Removed the long-deprecated and defunct fallback_encoding parameter of stri_read_lines and the ellipsis parameter of stri_opts_collator, stri_opts_regex, stri_opts_fixed, and stri_opts_regex.

• [BUILD TIME] As per the suggestion of Prof. Brian Ripley, icudt74l (ICU data - little endian) is now included in the source tarball (compressed with xz to save space). This allows for building stringi on systems with no internet access.

• [NEW FEATURE] #476: In break iterator-, date-time-, and collator-based operations (e.g., stri_sort), a warning is emitted when the root ICU resource bundle is returned when using an explicitly requested locale. This might happen when we pass an 'unknown' locale argument to these functions. Note that when relying on the default locale=NULL argument, no warning is emitted. In such a case, checking if the default locale as returned by stri_enc_get is amongst those listed in stri_enc_list is recommended.

• [NEW FEATURE] The C locale identifier now resolves to en_US_POSIX.

• [BUGFIX] #469: stri_datetime_parse did not reset the Calendar object when parsing multiple dates.

• [BUGFIX] #487: Some functions did not accept ASCII strings longer than 858993457 characters on input.