janitor::clean_names() in rstudio cloud and ASCII Error

[Chris_Papalia]

I'm using this code chunk which works in Rstudio IDE, but it's not working in rstudio.cloud. I'm guessing it has something to do with the ` but the data comes in like that and I can't use dplyr::rename() on it either.

covid_cases_tidy <- covid_cases %>% 
  pivot_longer(
    cols = -`Province/State`:-Long,  
    names_to = "date", 
    values_to = "cases"
  ) %>% as_tibble() %>% 
  mutate(date = as.Date(date)) %>% 
  clean_names()

I get this error:
Error in stringi::stri_trans_general(replaced_names, id = "Greek-Latin;Latin-ASCII;Accents-Any;Any-ASCII") :
A '::id' rule specifies an unknown transliterator. (U_INVALID_ID)

[joels]

I was able to reproduce this issue in my RStudio Cloud instance. I don't know the underlying cause, but it appears to be something to do with clean_names itself, as it happens with every data frame I've tried, including ones with legal names. Here's an example using the built-in billboard data frame:

library(tidyverse)
library(janitor)

# Change to an illegal column name in the first position
names(billboard)[1] = "Province/State"

Now let's use set_names to change / to _, making the name legal. Even then we still get the error from clean_names:

billboard %>%
  pivot_longer(cols = -`Province/State`:-date.entered) %>% 
  set_names(gsub("/","_", names(.))) %>% 
  clean_names()

Error in stringi::stri_trans_general(replaced_names, id = "Greek-Latin;Latin-ASCII;Accents-Any;Any-ASCII") : 
  A '::id' rule specifies an unknown transliterator. (U_INVALID_ID)

Actually, the same error occurs even if the names all start out legal:

clean_names(mtcars)

Error in stringi::stri_trans_general(replaced_names, id = "Greek-Latin;Latin-ASCII;Accents-Any;Any-ASCII") : 
  A '::id' rule specifies an unknown transliterator. (U_INVALID_ID)

Here's a workaround:

billboard %>%
  pivot_longer(cols = -`Province/State`:-date.entered) %>% 
  set_names(tolower(make.names(names(.))))

Hopefully someone else will be able to explain why clean_names is erroring in RStudio Cloud.

[josh]

Possibly tracked in this issue for janitor, with the related issue in stringi.

[joels]

Thanks Josh. I posted the RStudio Cloud Session Info on the Github issue page.

[samfirke]

Sorry about this, this is a bug in janitor 2.0.0 that surfaced after it went to CRAN. We're hoping to get a quick fix into CRAN ASAP. In the meantime, users can try install stringi locally with install.packages("stringi", configure.args="--disable-pkg-config") -- if RStudio Cloud can be configured with that setup as well, that might solve it there.

In the meantime you can follow progress on that janitor GitHub issue linked above.

[joels]

The problem has now been fixed in the development version and the fix will soon be pushed to CRAN. You can get the development version by running devtools::install_github("sfirke/janitor").