Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

cffr (development version)

• as_bibentry() now returns a bibentry object when x is NULL, using metadata from the package in the current working directory.
• as_cff.bibentry() now selects the first issn of each bibentry().
• as_cff.bibentry() now preserves single keywords and generic institutions, removes empty keyword values, restores collection-type: book-series for @book and @inbook series, preserves legal commas in URLs, removes duplicate URLs and extracts DOI resolver URLs only when their paths are valid DOI values. Partial BibLaTeX publication dates retain their available year and month, while unsupported date values remain available for CFF validation. Resolver query and fragment components are excluded from DOI values, while original URL metadata is retained.
• [.cff_ref_lst() and [.cff_pers_lst() now preserve their collection classes for subsets of any length.
• cff_create() no longer creates duplicate identifiers when merging inferred CRAN metadata with CITATION metadata.
• cff_create() now adds inferred CRAN DOIs only to packages available from CRAN. Dependency references retain extracted titles, abstracts, authors and citation years while adding their declared scope and version constraint, plus URLs and repository information from installed package metadata. A release date takes precedence over a citation year when available (#114).
• cff_create() now preserves every recognized alternative license from DESCRIPTION instead of limiting the CFF output to two SPDX identifiers.
• cff_create() now trims, removes empty and duplicate X-schema.org-keywords values and preserves a single value as a one-item CFF keyword array.
• cff_read_cff_citation() now preserves YAML sequences with one element, including keywords, while retaining invalid scalar values for CFF validation.
• cff_read_citation() now makes every field supplied in meta, including custom DESCRIPTION fields, available to CITATION files and no longer retries with metadata from the base package when reading fails (#114).

cffr 1.4.2

CRAN release: 2026-08-24

• The JOSS paper is now linked as an external pkgdown article instead of being rebuilt as a package vignette.
• cli messages now use more precise semantic markup, pluralization and public-facing error contexts.
• cff_gha_update() now uses path when updating .Rbuildignore.
• cff_read_bib_text() now rejects vectors that mix BibTeX entries with .bib file paths.
• cff_write_bib() and cff_write_citation() now stop before modifying an existing file when its backup cannot be created, and backup numbering is no longer limited to 100 files.
• cff_write() now formats the inst/CITATION update message correctly.

cffr 1.4.1

CRAN release: 2026-06-17

• Internal code and documentation were reviewed and refactored with AI assistance to improve maintainability, consistency and user-facing messages.
• Tests were improved with AI assistance to reduce dependence on external services and make internal fixtures more robust.

cffr 1.4.0

CRAN release: 2026-05-04

• DOIs in inst/CITATION url fields are detected, including those matching the pattern .*dx.doi.org/.
• The website field in definitions.person and definitions.entity uses ROR as a fallback.
• cff_read() correctly handles a single languages value (#105).
• cff_validate() now uses the ajv validation engine through jsonvalidate::json_validate(), which returns more informative error messages.

cffr 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2026-03-13

• The minimum required R version is now 4.1.0.
• Vignettes were migrated to Quarto.

cffr 1.2.1

CRAN release: 2026-01-12

• as_cff_person() improves comment detection and parsing across its function family.
• cff_gha_update() now runs in ubuntu-latest by default to save GitHub Actions quota (#90, thanks to @Pakillo).
• The mapping of CRAN packages to SPDX codes was updated.

cffr 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2025-01-25

• cff_write() gains a new r_citation argument. When it is set to TRUE, an R citation file (inst/CITATION) is generated or updated with the information from the generated CITATION.cff file. No backup copy is created. For more control, use cff_write_citation() (#79).
• repository-code now also recognizes Codeberg as a valid repository (#88).
• repository-code recognizes repositories regardless of casing. Lowercase is still recommended as a good practice for R developers.

cffr 1.1.1

CRAN release: 2024-08-16

• ORCID extraction was adapted for R > 4.4.1.

cffr 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2024-07-23

• cffr now automatically adds DOIs to packages on CRAN (for example, https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.cffr):
  • If the package has a CITATION file providing a DOI, the CITATION DOI is used as the main CITATION.cff doi and the CRAN DOI is added as an identifier.
  • Otherwise, the CRAN DOI is used as doi.
  • When extracting dependencies (for example, cff_create(dependencies = TRUE)) and the package dependency is on CRAN, the CRAN DOI is used for the dependency in the references key.
• commit is extracted from RemoteSha.
• The cran_to_spdx dataset was updated.

cffr 1.0.1

CRAN release: 2024-04-09

• cff_write() gains a new encoding argument to make it work with different encodings. See iconv().
• Fixed NOTEs caused by empty lines in documentation.

cffr 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2024-03-12

This is a major release with some notable changes. The main change affects non-core functions. The natural workflow (cff_create() → cff_write() → cff_validate()) should not be affected.

Major changes

Classes and methods

cffr now implements a new class system for definitions.reference, definitions.person and definitions.entity objects:

• A list of definitions.reference objects, such as references, has class cff_ref_lst, cff. Individual elements, such as preferred-citation or each member of references, have class cff_ref, cff.
• A list of definitions.person or definitions.entity objects, such as authors or contact, has class cff_pers_lst, cff. Individual elements, such as publisher or each member of authors, have class cff_pers, cff.

This change enables specific S3 methods and extends the capabilities of the package.

• as_cff() is a new S3 generic that replaces as.cff() and coerces R objects to cff class format. Current methods provided are:
  • as_cff.Bibtex().
  • as_cff.bibentry(), replacing cff_parse_citation().
  • as_cff.person(), similar to as_cff_person() but only for person objects. We recommend using as_cff_person() since it can also coerce strings representing authors in BibTeX markup ("{von Neumen}, James"), which cannot be captured properly through methods.
• as_bibentry() is a new method for a variety of classes (character, list, NULL and classes defined by cffr).
• as_cff_person() is a new method.
• The following base and utils package methods now support the cff class:
  • as.data.frame.cff().
  • as.person(), although only for definitions.person or definitions.entity, such as authors, contacts, editors or publisher.
  • head.cff(), tail.cff().
  • toBibtex.cff().

API

The API has been completely revised to clarify function naming and simplify internal maintenance. This change only affects non-core functions. Each function now does fewer things but does them better. The old API has been deprecated and now warns when used, providing advice on the replacement function.

Deprecation

• cff_to_bibtex() and cff_extract_to_bibtex(): replaced by the as_bibentry() S3 generic.
• cff_parse_person() and cff_parse_person_bibtex(): replaced by the as_cff_person() S3 generic.
• cff_parse_citation(): replaced by the as_cff() S3 generic.
• cff_from_bibtex(): replaced by cff_read_bib() (for *.bib files) and cff_read_bib_text() (for character strings).
• write_bib() and write_citation(): replaced by cff_write_bib() and cff_write_citation(), respectively.
• Argument path in cff() is also deprecated, use cff_read() instead.

New capabilities

• cff_read() now reads only from external files. It is designed to fit all supported file types in a single entry point, along with more specific readers used internally by cff_read():
  • cff_read_cff_citation().
  • cff_read_description().
  • cff_read_citation().
  • cff_read_bib().
• cff_modify() is a new function for updating and modifying cff objects easily.

Other changes

• The minimum required R version is now 4.0.0.
• The BibTeX crosswalk was updated (see vignette("bibtex-cff", package = "cffr")), with corresponding changes in the mapping performed by toBibtex() and cff_parse_citation():
  • @inbook and @book gain a new value in CFF when series is provided: collection-type: book-series.
  • cffr can now handle BibLaTeX @inbook, which differs significantly from BibTeX @inbook.

cffr 0.5.0

CRAN release: 2023-05-05

Lifecycle

• cff_to_bibtex() and cff_extract_to_bibtex() have been merged. cff_extract_to_bibtex() is now soft-deprecated.

New features

• write_citation() is a new function that can generate an inst/CITATION file from a cff object (#51).

Enhancements

• Additional authors of an R package can now be included based on roles in the DESCRIPTION file, through the authors_roles argument (#49).

• The message interface now uses cli.

• The invisible result of cff_validate() now includes the summary of errors (if any) as an attributes() named "error", as jsonvalidate::json_validate() does when verbose = TRUE:

  Be verbose? If TRUE, then an attribute "errors" will list validation failures as a data frame.

• Improved extraction of date-released.

cffr 0.4.1

CRAN release: 2023-01-30

• Replaced the crayon dependency with cli (#46).
• cff_validate() performance was improved.

cffr 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2022-11-17

• Fixed typo (#40, thanks to @dpprdan).
• Added cff_from_bibtex().
• Dependency URLs now behave consistently when RSPM is the default repository (for example, on GitHub Actions or RStudio Cloud).

cffr 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2022-09-23

• preferred-citation is only produced when inst/CITATION has been provided with the package (#37).
• Improved email handling for authors.
• Added cff_read(). This functionality was already implemented in cff(), but the new function provides clarity.

cffr 0.2.3

CRAN release: 2022-08-15

• Fixed the HTML5 issue as requested by CRAN.

cffr 0.2.2

CRAN release: 2022-04-08

• cffr now uses a local copy of schema.json for validation (#33).

cffr 0.2.1

CRAN release: 2022-01-16

• The GitHub Actions workflow now runs only on the master or main branch.
• References are handled better.

cffr 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2022-01-04

• cffr now also extracts information about package dependencies and adds the main citation of the dependencies to the references key, using citation(auto = TRUE).
  • Added the dependencies argument to cff_create() and cff_write().
• Other improvements to cff_parse_citation() include:
  • cff_parse_citation() extracts more information about authors, based on the fields provided in the DESCRIPTION file.
  • cff_parse_citation() does a better job extracting information from bibentry()/BibTeX and mapping it to the preferred-citation and references CFF keys.
• Added new functions for working with git pre-commit hooks :
  • cff_git_hook_install().
  • cff_git_hook_remove().
• Added new BibTeX functions:
  • cff_extract_to_bibtex().
  • cff_to_bibtex().
  • cff_parse_person_bibtex().
  • write_bib().
• Added a new dependency: lifecycle.

cffr 0.1.1

CRAN release: 2021-11-11

• Accepted by JOSS.
• Added pages to cff_parse_citation().
• Added the gh_keywords argument to cff_create()/cff_write(). If TRUE, it includes GitHub repository topics as keywords.

cffr 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2021-11-04

• First CRAN release.

cffr 0.0.2

• cffr is now part of rOpenSci.
• Updated documentation and README.
• Added fuzzy matching for the keys argument.
• Added the cran_to_spdx dataset.
• Added the DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5509766.
• Installed package citations are extracted using citation().
• The preferred-citation key is automatically generated from DESCRIPTION.
• Renamed cff_schema_definitions_reference() to cff_schema_definitions_refs().
• repository key is supported.
• Added the vignette("r-cff", package = "cffr") vignette.
• Added support for Bioconductor packages.
• Added cff_gha_update().

cffr 0.0.1

• First stable release.