Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

cffr 1.4.0

CRAN release: 2026-05-04

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

cffr 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2026-03-13

• Minimum R version required now is 4.1.0.
• Migrate vignettes to Quarto.

cffr 1.2.1

CRAN release: 2026-01-12

• cff_gha_update() action now runs in ubuntu-latest by default to save GitHub Actions quota (#90, thanks to @Pakillo).
• Improve comments detection and parsing in as_cff_person() function family.
• Update mapping of CRAN packages to SPDX codes.

cffr 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2025-01-25

• New argument r_citation in cff_write(). 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. It is still advised to use lowercase as a good practice for R developers.

cffr 1.1.1

CRAN release: 2024-08-16

• Adapt extraction of orcid to R > 4.4.1.

cffr 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2024-07-23

• cffr now automatically adds DOIs to packages on CRAN (e.g. 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 (e.g. cff_create(dependencies = TRUE)) and the package dependency is on CRAN, the CRAN DOI is used for the dependency in the references key.
• Extract commit from RemoteSha.
• Update cran_to_spdx dataset.

cffr 1.0.1

CRAN release: 2024-04-09

• Update cff_write() to add a new encoding argument to make it work with different encodings, see iconv().
• Fix NOTEs due to empty lines in docs.

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, hence the natural workflow (cff_create() → cff_write() → cff_validate()) shouldn’t be affected.

Major changes

Classes and methods

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

• A list of definitions.reference objects (e.g. references) has class cff_ref_lst, cff, and individual elements (e.g. preferred-citation or each member of references) have class cff_ref, cff.
• A list of definitions.person or definitions.entity objects (e.g. authors, contact) has class cff_pers_lst, cff, and individual elements (e.g. publisher or each member of authors) have class cff_pers, cff.

This change allows writing specific S3 Methods and extends the capabilities of the package.

• New as_cff() S3 generic method (replacing as.cff()): This method 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 coerce also strings representing authors in BibTeX markup ("{von Neumen}, James"), which cannot be captured properly via methods.
• New as_bibentry() method for a variety of classes (character, list, NULL and classes defined by cffr).
• New as_cff_person() method.
• The following base and utils methods now support the cff class:
  • as.data.frame.cff().
  • as.person(), although only for definitions.person or definitions.entity (e.g. authors, contacts, editors, publisher, etc.).
  • head.cff(), tail.cff().
  • toBibtex.cff().

API

The API has been completely reviewed to provide more clarity on function naming and to facilitate internal maintenance. This change only affects non-core functions. Now each function does fewer things but does them better. The old API has been deprecated and it warns when used, providing advice on the replacement function.

Deprecation

• cff_to_bibtex() and cff_extract_to_bibtex(): replaced by as_bibentry() S3 generic.
• cff_parse_person() and cff_parse_person_bibtex(): replaced by as_cff_person() S3 generic.
• cff_parse_citation(): replaced by 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

• Now reading from external files is performed exclusively by cff_read() (that is designed to fit all supported file types on a single entry point) and the new specific readers (that are used under the hood by cff_read()), namely:
  • cff_read_cff_citation(),
  • cff_read_description(),
  • cff_read_citation()
  • cff_read_bib().
• New cff_modify() function for updating and modifying cff objects easily.

Other changes

• Minimum R version required now is 4.0.0.
• Update of BibTeX crosswalk (see vignette("bibtex-cff", package = "cffr")) and consequently changes in the mapping performed by as_bibtex() cff_parse_citation():
  • @inbook and @book gains a new value on CFF when series is provided: collection-type: book-series.
  • Can handle BibLaTeX @inbook, that differs significantly from BibTeX @inbook.

cffr 0.5.0

CRAN release: 2023-05-05

Lifecycle

• Function cff_to_bibtex() and cff_extract_to_bibtex() have been merged, the latter (cff_extract_to_bibtex()) is now soft-deprecated.

New features

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

Enhancements

• Additional authors of a R package can be now included based on the role on the DESCRIPTION file, via the argument authors_roles (#49).

• New message interface based on cli capabilities.

• Now the (invisible) result of cff_validate() 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

• Improvements in the extraction of `date-release`.

cffr 0.4.1

CRAN release: 2023-01-30

• Replace crayon dependency for cli (#46).
• Improvements on the performance of cff_validate().

cffr 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2022-11-17

• Fix typo (#40) by @dpprdan
• Add new function cff_from_bibtex().
• Consistent behavior on dependency urls when RSPM is the default repo (i.e. on GitHub Actions or RStudio Cloud).

cffr 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2022-09-23

• preferred-citation is only produced when a CITATION R file has been provided with the package (#37).
• Improve email handling on authors.
• Add cff_read() function. This functionality was already implemented on cff() but new function added in order to provide clarity.

cffr 0.2.3

CRAN release: 2022-08-15

• Fix the HTML5 issue as requested by CRAN.

cffr 0.2.2

CRAN release: 2022-04-08

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

cffr 0.2.1

CRAN release: 2022-01-16

• GitHub Action now runs only on the master or main branch.
• Better handling of references.

cffr 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2022-01-04

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

cffr 0.1.1

CRAN release: 2021-11-11

• Accepted by JOSS.
• Include pages on cff_parse_citation() .
• New gh_keywords argument on cff_create() /cff_write(). If TRUE, it includes GitHub repo 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.
• Update on docs and README.
• Add fuzzy match on keys argument.
• New dataset: cran_to_spdx.
• Add DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5509766
• Citation of installed packages extracted using citation().
• Auto-generating preferred-citation key from DESCRIPTION.
• Rename cff_schema_definitions_reference() to cff_schema_definitions_refs().
• repository key is supported.
• Added vignette: vignette("r-cff", package = "cffr").
• Add support to Bioconductor packages.
• New function: cff_gha_update().

cffr 0.0.1

• First stable release