Installation fails: Error in parse(outFile) : {INSTALL_DIR}/officer/R/docx_comments.R:52:44: unexpected input

[lehmus]

I am unable to install officer:

> install.packages("officer")
Installing package into ‘/home/dockeruser/lib/r’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
Secure CRAN mirrors 

 1: 0-Cloud [https]
...
73: (other mirrors)

Selection: 54
trying URL 'https://cran.uib.no/src/contrib/officer_0.6.4.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 699063 bytes (682 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 682 KB

* installing *source* package ‘officer’ ...
** package ‘officer’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** R
Error in parse(outFile) : 
  /tmp/RtmpD23Qrh/R.INSTALL1f83f4952d/officer/R/docx_comments.R:52:44: unexpected input
51: 
52:   comment_text_runs <- lapply(comment_ids, \
                                               ^
ERROR: unable to collate and parse R files for package ‘officer’
* removing ‘/home/dockeruser/lib/r/officer’

The downloaded source packages are in
        ‘/tmp/RtmpyQt3dE/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("officer") :
  installation of package ‘officer’ had non-zero exit status

The same error occurs when I try to install the latest stable version or install from source:

> install.packages("devtools", version="0.5.2")

> devtools::install_github("davidgohel/officer")

I am running R 3.6.0 on Ubuntu 20.04:

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26)
Platform: x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS/LAPACK: /home/dockeruser/miniconda/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C           LC_TIME=C.UTF-8       
 [4] LC_COLLATE=C.UTF-8     LC_MONETARY=C.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=C.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=C.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C              LC_ADDRESS=C          
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C         LC_MEASUREMENT=C.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C   

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

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.12       magrittr_2.0.3    usethis_2.2.2     devtools_2.4.5   
 [5] pkgload_1.3.4     xtable_1.8-4      R6_2.5.1          rlang_1.1.3      
 [9] fastmap_1.1.1     urlchecker_1.0.1  stringr_1.5.1     tools_3.6.0      
[13] pkgbuild_1.4.3    sessioninfo_1.2.2 miniUI_0.1.1.1    cli_3.6.2        
[17] remotes_2.4.2.1   htmltools_0.5.7   ellipsis_0.3.2    digest_0.6.34    
[21] lifecycle_1.0.4   processx_3.8.3    shiny_1.8.0       callr_3.7.3      
[25] purrr_1.0.2       later_1.3.2       ps_1.7.6          vctrs_0.6.5      
[29] profvis_0.3.8     htmlwidgets_1.6.4 fs_1.6.3          promises_1.2.1   
[33] curl_5.2.0        memoise_2.0.1     glue_1.7.0        cachem_1.0.8     
[37] mime_0.12         stringi_1.8.3     compiler_3.6.0    desc_1.4.3       
[41] httpuv_1.6.14

For some reason, it doesn't recognize the '\' character in code. A quick web search indicates that this has something to do with the system locale. My locale info is:

> l10n_info()
$MBCS
[1] TRUE

$`UTF-8`
[1] TRUE

$`Latin-1`
[1] FALSE

The installation happens under the standard Ubuntu Docker image. This is really odd, because the same Dockerfile has worked previously (~year ago). Here is an example Dockerfile to reproduce the issue:

FROM ubuntu:20.04

USER root:root

ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

ENV LANG=C.UTF-8
ENV LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
ENV TZ=Etc/UTC
ENV R_LIBS_USER=/home/dockeruser/lib/r

RUN apt-get update --fix-missing && \
    apt-get upgrade -y && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        systemd \
        rsyslog \
        runit \
        wget \
        build-essential \
        cmake \
        libssl-dev \
        libxml2-dev \
        libfreetype6-dev \
        libpng-dev \
        libtiff5-dev \
        libjpeg-dev \
        libfontconfig1-dev \
        libharfbuzz-dev \
        libfribidi-dev \
        pandoc \
        lmodern && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends r-base && \
    apt-get autoremove -y && \
    apt-get clean -y && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

RUN useradd --create-home dockeruser
WORKDIR /home/dockeruser
USER dockeruser:dockeruser

RUN mkdir --parents $R_LIBS_USER
RUN Rscript -e "install.packages('officer')"

[davidgohel]

Hello, OK, thanks for letting us know that issue.

This code is coming from a PR and I did not notice it was using synxtax \(id) instead of function(id). So the issue can be fixed with R > 4.0 or 4.1 (not sure when > and \(id) were integrated).

Is it possible for you to update to latest R?

[lehmus]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I might be required to use R v3 because of other dependencies in the project, need to double-check that.

The project has worked before with the same dependencies, so I might be able to fix the issue by freezing the office package version before the PR was introduced. I will try that once I get back to work.

[davidgohel]

we will send a fixed version on CRAN in the following weeks

[lehmus]

Great, thank you!