To me this is a common situation, especially to switch between two
languages. I solve it by separating the coding of values and their
labels. Values are coded numerically or as character, and their
labels are attached by a value.label attribute. When needed a
modified factor function transforms
I've recently been working with some California county-level data. The
counties can be referred to as either FIPS codes, eg F060102, friendly
names such as "Del Norte County", names without 'County' on the end,
names with 'CA' on the end ("Del Norte County, CA"). Different data
sets use slightly di
