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hanyupinyin

hanyupinyin converts Chinese characters into Hanyu Pinyin in R. It is a modern, vectorized, and self-contained package inspired by the now-orphaned CRAN package pinyin.

Why hanyupinyin?

• Authoritative data – dictionary sourced from the Unicode Unihan Database (kMandarin), covering ~44k unique characters.
• Fully vectorized – no slow sapply loops; works natively on character vectors.
• Polyphone aware – built-in phrase table for common ambiguous words (e.g. 银行, 行长) with user-extensible overrides.
• Data-cleaning friendly – helpers for generating valid R variable names, URL slugs, initials, and toneless output.

Installation

You can install the development version of hanyupinyin from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("CuiHR17/hanyupinyin")

Usage

library(hanyupinyin)

# Basic conversion
to_pinyin("春眠不觉晓")
#> [1] "chun1_mian2_bu4_jue2_xiao3"

# Toneless
to_pinyin_toneless("中华人民共和国")
#> [1] "zhong_hua_ren_min_gong_he_guo"

# Initials only
to_pinyin_initials("中华人民共和国")
#> [1] "zhrmghg"

# Polyphone handling
to_pinyin("银行行长", polyphone = TRUE)
#> [1] "yin2 hang2 hang2 zhang3"

# Generate valid R variable names from Chinese labels
to_varname(c("姓名", "年龄", "性别"))
#> [1] "xing_ming"  "nian_ling"  "xing_bie"

# URL-friendly slug
to_slug("2026年报告")
#> [1] "2026-nian-bao-gao"

Custom polyphone phrases

add_phrase("测试短语", "ce4 shi4 duan3 yu3")
to_pinyin("测试短语", polyphone = TRUE)
#> [1] "ce4 shi4 duan3 yu3"

list_phrases()

Acknowledgements

This package was inspired by the CRAN package pinyin (Peng Zhao et al.), which was archived in April 2026 after the maintainer became unreachable. hanyupinyin is a ground-up rewrite using standard Unicode data and modern R practices.

Dictionary data are derived from the Unicode Unihan Database (https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/) and used under the Unicode License.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.