ortho: Orthographical symbols

In toponym: Analyze and Visualize Toponyms

Orthographical symbols

Description

This function retrieves all symbols used in country data.

Usage

ortho(countries, ...)

Arguments

countries	character string vector with country designations (names or ISO-codes).
...	Additional parameter: column character string. Selects the column for query. toponym_path character string. Path name for downloaded data.

Details

Parameter countries accepts all designations found in country(query = "country table").

The default column is "alternatenames". Other columns of possible interest are "name" and "asciiname". It outputs an ordered frequency table of all symbols used in a given column of the GeoNames data for one or more countries specified.

Parameter toponym_path accepts "pkgdir" for the package directory or a full, alternative path. With toponymOptions(), users can specify the path for toponym and map data downloaded by this package across sessions. See help(toponymOptions). The data used is downloaded by getData() and is accessible on the GeoNames download server.

Value

A table with frequencies of all symbols.

Examples

## We recommend setting a persistent path for downloaded data by using toponymOptions()
## Users can always set the path manually when a function is used
## For illustration purposes,
## 1. the path is manually set each time
## 2. and wrapped in donttest because data will be downloaded in the following example:

ortho(countries = "MC", toponym_path = tempdir())
# returns a table with frequencies of all symbols
# in the "alternatenames" column for the Monaco data set

toponym documentation built on April 13, 2026, 5:06 p.m.