Improve error in xml feed creation when empty title is provided.

[apeterson91]

I'm getting the following error when running rmarkdown::render for a distill article

Error in `xml_text<-.xml_node`(`*tmp*`, value = text) : 
  STRING_ELT() can only be applied to a 'character vector', not a 'list'

However this error only occurs only when the option draft: false or the YAML draft option is omitted.
If draft: true the article renders as it should.

My sessioninfo is as follows:

R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Monterey 12.3

Matrix products: default
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] rstudioapi_0.13 xml2_1.3.2 knitr_1.36 magrittr_2.0.2 downlit_0.4.0 R6_2.5.1 jpeg_0.1-9
[8] rlang_1.0.1 fastmap_1.1.0 fansi_0.5.0 stringr_1.4.0 highr_0.9 tools_4.1.2 xfun_0.28
[15] png_0.1-7 cli_3.1.0 jquerylib_0.1.4 htmltools_0.5.2 yaml_2.2.1 digest_0.6.29 rprojroot_2.0.2
[22] bookdown_0.24 sass_0.4.0 vctrs_0.3.8 rsconnect_0.8.18 distill_1.3.1 mime_0.12 memoise_2.0.0
[29] cachem_1.0.6 evaluate_0.14 rmarkdown_2.11 stringi_1.7.5 compiler_4.1.2 bslib_0.3.1 generics_0.1.1
[36] jsonlite_1.8.0 lubridate_1.8.0

[cderv]

Hi,

Can you share more about your example so that I can reproduce ? rmarkdown::render_article() is not a function in the rmarkdown package so not sure I follow.

• I tried the template article created from RStudio IDE and ran rmarkdown::render(): It succeeded with no issue, no matter the draft YAML key
• I tried by creating a new blog project. I created a new post with draft option, and rendered the post and the website without error.

To look into this further, I need a reproducible project where this happens (a github repo with this ?) or detailled step to reproduce using one of the templates.

Please also do update all the packages to be sure past bugs are fixed.

Thank you

[apeterson91]

My apologies.
The function in question is rmarkdown::render() though I usually use the Rstudio keyboard shortcut CMD+K.
You can see the article and github repo where this occurs at https://github.com/apeterson91/xstreetvalidated.

I had been working on an article, without trouble until it stopped working as intended. The error affects my attempt to render any article and built the site.

[apeterson91]

gentle ping to see present status.

If you do a git clone of the current branch for the repo linked above you should be able to reproduce the error stated in the first post. If not, that may suggest something to do with my system.

[cderv]

You get this error because you are providing an empty description. We currently handle no description that will default to title, but here you specifically set description to be empty string. This creates the issue when generating the XML feed.

https://github.com/apeterson91/xstreetvalidated/blob/78275569f99052ca373433ee49be37d16f3ef373/_posts/2021-10-09-bikes/bikes.Rmd#L3

title: "What's the Buzz around Bikes?"
description: |
author:
  - name: Adam Peterson
    url: https://apetersonsite.org/

I'll see how I can error more gracefully in this case. But you should either not provide a description field, or provide one which would be better.

[apeterson91]

Ah, understood – thanks for the help!