Package {gendercoder}

Title: Recodes Sex/Gender Descriptions into a Standard Set
Version: 0.1.1
Description: Provides dictionary-based tools for recoding free-text gender responses into consistent categories while preserving gender diversity where possible. The package standardises spelling, capitalization, whitespace, and common variants through curated named character-vector dictionaries, supports either detailed or collapsed output categories, and can retain original unmatched responses for manual review. It also includes helpers for creating custom dictionaries from approximate string matches and a local interactive application for recoding uploaded data files.
Depends: R (≥ 3.0.0)
Maintainer: Yaoxiang Li <liyaoxiang@outlook.com>
License: GPL-2
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 7.3.3
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, bs4Dash, haven, shiny
VignetteBuilder: knitr
URL: https://github.com/ropensci/gendercoder
BugReports: https://github.com/ropensci/gendercoder/issues
NeedsCompilation: no
Packaged: 2026-05-12 23:45:55 UTC; Bach
Author: Yaoxiang Li ORCID iD [aut, cre], Jennifer Beaudry ORCID iD [aut], Emily Kothe ORCID iD [aut], Felix Singleton Thorn ORCID iD [aut], Rhydwyn McGuire [aut], Nicholas Tierney ORCID iD [aut], Mathew Ling ORCID iD [aut], Julia Silge [rev] (Julia reviewed the package (v. 0.0.0.9000) for rOpenSci, see <https://github.com/ropensci/software-review/issues/435>), Elin Waring [rev] (Elin reviewed the package (v. 0.0.0.9000) for rOpenSci, see <https://github.com/ropensci/software-review/issues/435>)
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2026-05-18 18:10:16 UTC

gendercoder: A Package for Recoding Freetext Gender Data

Description

Provides dictionaries and recode_gender() to allow for easy automatic coding of common variations in free-text responses to the question "What is your gender?"

Author(s)

Maintainer: Yaoxiang Li liyaoxiang@outlook.com (ORCID)

Authors:

Other contributors:

See Also

Useful links:

fewlevels_en

Description

An English dictionary for the recode_gender function that has fewer levels

Create a custom dictionary from fuzzy matches

Description

gender_create_dictionary suggests dictionary entries for gender responses that are not already matched exactly. The returned named character vector is intended to be reviewed before it is combined with a built-in dictionary and passed to recode_gender().

Usage

gender_create_dictionary(
  gender,
  dictionary = gendercoder::manylevels_en,
  max_distance = 1
)

Arguments

gender

a character vector of gender responses for recoding

dictionary

a character vector whose names are known gender responses and whose values are replacement values

max_distance

maximum edit distance allowed for a suggested match

Value

a named character vector of suggested replacement values

Examples

suggested <- gender_create_dictionary(
  c("maile", "unknown"),
  dictionary = manylevels_en,
  max_distance = 1
)
suggested

Launch the gendercoder Shiny app

Description

Code data interactively in a Shiny app that runs locally in RStudio or a web browser using a bs4Dash interface. The app supports CSV, Stata, SPSS, RDS, and R data files. Stata and SPSS files require the optional haven package.

Usage

gendercoder_app(...)

Arguments

...

arguments to pass to shiny::runApp()

Value

Called for its side effect of launching a Shiny app.

Examples

if (interactive()) {
gendercoder_app()
}

manylevels_en

Description

An English dictionary for the recode_gender function that has many levels

recode_gender

Description

recode_gender matches uncleaned gender responses to cleaned list using an built-in or custom dictionary.

Usage

recode_gender(
  gender,
  dictionary = gendercoder::manylevels_en,
  retain_unmatched = FALSE
)

Arguments

gender

a character vector of gender responses for recoding

dictionary

a list that the contains gender responses and their replacement values. A built-in dictionary manylevels_en is used by default if an alternative dictionary is not supplied.

retain_unmatched

logical indicating if gender responses that are not found in dictionary should be filled with the uncleaned values during recoding

Value

a character vector of recoded genders

Examples



df <- data.frame(
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
  gender = c("male", "MALE", "mle", "I am male", "femail", "female", "enby"),
  age = c(34L, 37L, 77L, 52L, 68L, 67L, 83L)
)

df$recoded_gender <- recode_gender(df$gender,
  dictionary = manylevels_en,
  retain_unmatched = TRUE
)
df

sample

Description

A sample data.frame of free-text gender in English for testing and demonstration