stringx: Drop-in replacements for base R string functions powered by stringi

English is the native language for only 5% of the World population. Also, only 17% of us can understand this text. Moreover, the Latin alphabet is the main one for merely 36% of the total. The early computer era, now a very long time ago, was dominated by the US. Due to the proliferation of the internet, smartphones, social media, and other technologies and communication platforms, this is no longer the case. The stringx package replaces base R string functions (such as grep(), tolower(), and sprintf()) with ones that fully support the Unicode standards related to natural language processing, fixes some long-standing inconsistencies, and introduces some new, useful features. Thanks to ICU (International Components for Unicode) and stringi, they are fast, reliable, and portable across different platforms. Now available from CRAN.