mn_match: Match place names and codes to Mongolian administrative units

In mongolmaps: Maps and Administrative Boundaries of Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar

Match place names and codes to Mongolian administrative units

Description

Converts any common way of writing a Mongolian place into its code: English spellings ("Khuvsgul", "Khovsgol", "Hovsgol"), Cyrillic, NSO statistical codes, ISO 3166-2 codes and P-codes. Names are compared through a normalised key, so spelling variants, case, punctuation and words such as "aimag", "province", "soum" or "district" do not matter. Values that still do not match are tried with a small edit distance.

Usage

mn_match(
  x,
  level = NULL,
  within = NULL,
  to = c("pcode", "name_en", "name_mn", "name_mns", "iso_code", "nso_code", "level",
    "type"),
  fuzzy = TRUE,
  max_dist = NULL,
  quiet = FALSE
)

Arguments

x	A character vector of names or codes (numbers and factors are converted to character).
level	The level(s) to search: "country", "region", "aimag", "soum" (includes Ulaanbaatar districts) or "bag" (includes khoroos). NULL (the default) searches every level, preferring aimags, then soums, regions, the country and bags.
within	Restricts the search to units inside a parent, given as a name or code. Use it to separate soums that share a name. Either a single value or one value per element of x.
to	What to return: "pcode" (default), "name_en", "name_mn", "name_mns", "iso_code", "nso_code", "level" or "type".
fuzzy	If TRUE (default), values without an exact match are matched by edit distance when a single close candidate exists. Each fuzzy match is reported in a message so you can check it.
max_dist	Maximum edit distance for fuzzy matching. NULL scales it with the length of the name (0 for 3 letters or fewer, up to 3 for long names).
quiet	If TRUE, suppresses the message listing fuzzy matches. Warnings about ambiguous or unmatched values are always shown.

Value

A character vector the same length as x. Values that cannot be matched, or that match several units, are NA and are listed in a warning.

See Also

Other names and codes: mn_codes(), mn_translit()

Examples

mn_match(c("Khuvsgul", "Hovsgol", "\\u0425\\u04e9\\u0432\\u0441\\u0433\\u04e9\\u043b", "MN-041"))

# NSO statistical codes work too
mn_match(c("183", "511", "51107"), to = "name_en")

# Many soums share a name: say which aimag you mean
mn_match("Bayan-Uul", level = "soum", within = "Dornod")

# Khoroos are numbered within their district
mn_match("15-r khoroo", level = "bag", within = "Bayangol")

mongolmaps documentation built on Oct. 10, 2026, 5:08 p.m.