Poor error message when "missing" format objects

[MichaelChirico]

I made the mistake not to include some of the named elements & was met with a very strange error it took me a while to figure out:

Error in as.character(.transformer(expr, env)) :
cannot coerce type 'closure' to vector of type 'character'

This is because my input was actually a named function (and even though closure should have been a dead giveaway on this I spent 10 minutes + debugging):

glue::glue_data(list(x = 1), '{x} cannot be bigger than {stop}')

I'm not sure any easy way to fix this/give a more helpful message, but if so it could save time debugging.

[jimhester]

We will look into this during the Tidy dev day at RStudio::conf.

I think the easiest way to fix it would be to have glue use a small wrapper around as.character() which provides a more informative error message than the default when the coercion fails.

glue/R/glue.R

Line 105 in fcdfa61

f <- function(expr) as.character(.transformer(expr, env))

ref. tidyverse error messages

[ijlyttle]

claiming! first stop reprex!