Inconsistent output from tidy_description

[csgillespie]

I have the following package DESCRIPTION

Package: jrIdentity
Title: Style Jumping Rivers Branded Content
Version: 0.0.1
Authors@R:
    person(given = "Jumping",
           family = "Rivers",
           role = c("aut", "cre"),
           email = "info@jumpingrivers.com")
Description: Package to provide RMarkdown templates to create
    Jumping Rivers branded content.
License: file LICENSE
Imports:
    rmarkdown,
    rmdformats
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 6.1.1
Suggest: knitr

Running on my laptop

library(desc)
desc = desc::description$new(".")
message(desc$get_field(key = "Description"))
desc$normalize()
message(desc$get_field(key = "Description"))

the Description tag isn't changed.

However, running on our GitLab runner it changes the description line to:

Description: Package to provide RMarkdown templates to create Jumping 
     Rivers branded content.

What I don't understand is why.

• Both systems are ubuntu 18.04
• Both running R 3.6
• Both access the file via a GitLab repo
• Both use the same versions of usethis (1.5.1) and desc (1.20).

I've searched desc for a width option, but it appears the width of the file is hard-coded

reprex

The DESCRIPTION file above. Not sure what the correct output should be.

---

Originally posted r-lib/usethis#887

[csgillespie]

The issue is due to counting characters. When calculating the width, the following line is called:

strwrap(paste0(x$key,  ": ", desc:::color_bad(x)), exdent = 4, width = 75)

However, x$key is

crayon::blue("Description")
# "\033[34mDescription\033[39m"

When calculating the nchar, we are including the colour

nchar(crayon::blue(""))
# 10 

Since the gitlab runner doesn't have a colour terminal the first line is different.

• Setting options("crayon.enabled" = FALSE) on my laptop reproduces the output on the runner.
• Conversely, setting options("crayon.enabled" = TRUE) matches the runner to the laptop
• I would suggest that this is a bug since the intention is to stipulate a fixed width of 75, but in the practice, the first line has a width of only 65.