readxl 1.4.0
This release is mostly about substantial internal changes that should not be
noticeable to most users (but that set the stage for future work):
- Updating the embedded version of libxls (more below)
- Switching from Rcpp to cpp11 (more below)
- Refactoring to reduce duplication between the
.xlsand.xlsxbranches
However, there are a few small features / bug fixes:
-
"Date or Not Date": The classification of number formats as being datetime-ish
is more sophisticated and should no longer be so easily fooled by, e.g.,
colours or currencies. This affects cell and column type guessing, hopefully
for the better (#388, #559, @nacnudus, @reviewher). -
Cell location is determined more robustly in
.xlsxfiles, guarding against
the idiosyncratic way in which certain 3rd party tools include (or, rather,
do not include) cell location in individual cell nodes (#648, #671). -
Warning messages for impossible dates are more specific.
Unsupported dates prior to 1900 have their own message now, instead of being
lumped in with dates on the non-existent day of February 29, 1900
(#551, #554, @cderv).
Dependency and licensing changes
-
readxl is now licensed as MIT (#632).
-
readxl now states its support for R >= 3.4 explicitly.
Why 3.4? Because the tidyverse policy
is to support the current version, the devel version, and four previous
versions of R.
It was necessary to introduce a minimum R version, in order to state a minimum
version for a package listed inLinkingTo. -
readxl embeds libxls v1.6.2 (the previous release embedded v1.5.0).
The libxls project is hosted at https://github.com/libxls/libxls and you can
learn more about the cumulative changes in its release notes: -
readxl has switched from Rcpp to cpp11 and now requires C++11 (#659,
@sbearrows). -
The minimum version of tibble has been bumped to 2.0.1 (released 2019-01-12),
completing the transition to an approach to column name repair used across the
tidyverse.
