RStudio desktop will not start but R env okay and rstudio/rsession processes exist

[g.joue]

Error Information:

Description of issue

I was working in RStudio when I got an error that the connection to R was lost and it wanted to restart, which it did. I usually have headaches when this happens, so I q() out of RStudio and have not been able to get the desktop at all now. When I try to launch RStudio, no window opens but I see rstudio/rsession as processes. Before trying again, I would manually kill the rstudio process, which then gives me the message:

/common/apps/R-4.0.3/lib/R/bin/javareconf: line 379: 5977 Terminated ${run_prog}

Within the same terminal window (running rstudio in Debian on a server at work), other Java-based GUI apps work fine. Typing R in the same console enters the R environment with no problem. My attempts never create lines in the log files in .rstudio-desktop/log/

When I launch RStudio, I get the the usual messages I get anyway when it did work (which I tried to copy here but the forum system pukes at me -- can't create more than 2 links as a newbie).

Attempted steps taken to fix -

I tried restarting the console from which I launch RStudio, restarting the VNC server in which I run RStudio, deleting any init .[rR]* files from the places where I usually start RStudio, renaming the folder .rstudio-desktop.

I once had a similar problem and the culprit was non ASCII characters in a Rmarkdown file I was working on -- so I went through all my .Rmd and .R files in emacs, removed all suspicious characters, and deleted all associated .tex/.log/.html files.

Even after doing all that (deleting any init files and folders before each iteration), I still can't get the RStudio desktop (I've waited up to about half an hour). Our sys admin assures me that nothing was changed/updated on the system when this was happening.

System Information:

• RStudio Edition: Desktop
• RStudio Version: rstudio-1.2.1335
• OS Version: Debian 4.9.246-2 (2020-12-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux
• R Version: 4.0.3 (2020-10-10) -- "Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out"
• Output your diagnostics report (if possible): when run rstudio --run-diagnostics, it hangs. Had to ^C out of it and there was no rstudio-diagnostics folder nor diagnostics-report.txt anywhere

[g.joue]

Aha -- it works now. I honestly am not sure what did it, but I wanted to post my experience the last time I had this problem that it was the suspicious characters that prevented RStudio desktop from launching. This linux command let me find culprit characters that I needed to remove from my Rmd files:
cat <file> | LC_ALL=c tr -d "[:alnum:][:punct:][:space:]" (Thank you, Matthias Pietsch!)
Hope that helps someone else and save them the several days it took me to figure that one out with Matthias' help!

[MikeBess]

Glad you solved the problem! could you post a reduced example RMD file that fails? And identify which character(s) caused Rstudio to not load?