[R-pkg-devel] URL syntax causes R CMD build failure - a fix

[Spencer Graves]

I've encountered similar issues. However, it has been long enough ago 
that I don't remember enough details to say more without trying to 
update my CRAN packages to see what messages I get and maybe researching 
my notes from previous problems of this nature. Spencer Graves


On 9/2/23 4:23 PM, Greg Hunt wrote:
> The percent encoded characters appear to be valid in that URL, suggesting
> that rejecting them is an error. That kind of error could occur when the
> software processing them converts them back to a non-unicode character set.
> 
> On Sun, 3 Sep 2023 at 4:34 am, J C Nash <profjcnash using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'm posting this in case it helps some other developers getting build
>> failure.
>>
>> Recently package nlsr that I maintain got a message that it failed to
>> build on
>> some platforms. The exact source of the problem is still to be illuminated,
>> but seems to be in knitr::render and/or pandoc or an unfortunate
>> interaction.
>> An update to pandoc triggered a failure to process a vignette that had been
>> happily processed for several years. The error messages are unhelpful, at
>> least
>> to me,
>>
>>      Error at "nlsr-devdoc.knit.md" (line 5419, column 1):
>>      unexpected end of input
>>      Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 64
>>      Execution halted
>>
>> Unfortunately, adding "keep_md: TRUE" (you need upper case TRUE to save it
>> when
>> there is no error of this type), did not save the intermediate file in this
>> case. However, searching for "pandoc error 64" presented one web page
>> where the author
>> used brute force search of his document by removing / replacing sections
>> to find
>> the line(s) that caused trouble. This is a little tedious, but effective.
>> In my
>> case, the offending line turned out to be a copied and pasted URL
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenberg%E2%80%93Marquardt_algorithm
>>
>> The coded characters can be replaced by a hyphen, to give,
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenberg-Marquardt_algorithm
>>
>> and this, when pasted in Mozilla Firefox at least, will go to the
>> appropriate
>> wikipedia page.
>>
>> I'd be interested in hearing from others who have had similar
>> difficulties. I
>> suspect this is relatively rare, and causing some sort of infelicity in the
>> output of knitr::render that then trips up some versions of pandoc, that
>> may,
>> for instance, be now applying stricter rules to URL syntax.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> John Nash
>>
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