Bug - Lists within a list having the same name are shown to have the same content. Reproduction violates best practice.

[1morestudent]

System details

RStudio Edition : Desktop
RStudio Version : 1.1.383
OS Version      : Ubuntu 17.10 x64
R Version       :  R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28)

Steps to reproduce the problem

list1 <- list(c(1, 1, 1))
list2 <- list(c(2, 2 ,2))
a     <- list(list1, list2)
names(a) <- c("the_same", "the_same")

Clicking on the generated list in the global environment, so that the content of the list is displayed in the upper left window.

The window shows the content of both lists to be the same, although they are not, as can be checked with a[[1]][[1]] == a[[2]][[1]]

Describe the problem in detail

When displaying lists within lists, RStudio displays the same content for lists with the same name, even if the real content is different. This does not seem to happen with simple lists:

item1 <- c(1,1,1)
item2 <- c(2,2,2)
a <- list(item1, item2)

Describe the behavior you expected

To reproduce this bug you need to violate best practice. R seems, however, able to handle this, so I expect RStudio to work in the same way or produce a warning of some kind.
This is a really minor problem and should not happen for anyone coding in a reasonable manner. I still wanted to report this, as the behavior of RStudio deviates from the behavior of R itself.

[kevinushey]

The problem here is that the Object Explorer attempts to index the object by name, and since names are duplicated the first entry with that name is selected (c(1, 1, 1)).

[dfalty]

Reproduced on 1.2.747.

[oganm]

This is a really minor problem and should not happen for anyone coding in a reasonable manner. I still wanted to report this, as the behavior of RStudio deviates from the behavior of R itself.

If one tries to view an xml/html object, there naturally would be lots of elements with the same names due to tags being converted into names. listviewer package also fails with such objects so it does cause inconvenience when working with such files.

[jarekkupisz]

I believe I encountered the same problem, however, it got me during interactive work with pipes.

library(magrittr)
list(a = 1) %>% View()

Then, without closing the pane:
list(a = 1, b = 2) %>% View()

When working with pipes and View() you'll keep seeing the first object you piped. The data/data.frame view pane does not suffer from this problem and always replaces the old object with a new one.

I'm on Windows 10 Rstudio 1.3.959 official channel.

[jmcphers]

Also reported by @dmurdoch in #8283.

[mikebessuille]

Putting this in 1.5 since several people have discovered this.