无法使用 devtools 在 R 中从 GitHub 运行包

Question

Every time I try to download a package from GitHub using devtools I get an error. I'm currently trying to open the elan package:

 library(devtools)
 devtools::install_github("dalejbarr/elan")

I get the following error:

Installing package into 'C:/Users/Daniel & Catherine/Documents/R/win-library/3.6' (as 'lib' is unspecified) Error: no packages specified The system cannot find the path specified. Error: Failed to install 'elan' from GitHub: (converted from warning) installation of package
'C:/rtemp/Rtmp0gabkG/file5580567f6ac9/elan_0.1.tar.gz' had non-zero exit status

I've tried the solutions suggested here and here , but neither fix the problem. I understand that there might be a problem with the spaces in the path name, but there's not much I can do about that (I don't want to set up a new user on my computer just to run devtools ).

My SessionInfo() is:

 R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05)
 Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
 Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18362)

 Matrix products: default

 locale:
 [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                                 LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252    

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

 other attached packages:
 [1] devtools_2.2.2 usethis_1.5.1 

 loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
  [1] Rcpp_1.0.2        rstudioapi_0.10   magrittr_1.5      pkgload_1.0.2     R6_2.4.0          rlang_0.4.0       tools_3.6.1       pkgbuild_1.0.3         sessioninfo_1.1.1 cli_1.1.0         withr_2.1.2       ellipsis_0.3.0   
 [13] remotes_2.1.1     assertthat_0.2.1  digest_0.6.21     rprojroot_1.3-2   crayon_1.3.4      processx_3.4.0    callr_3.3.0       fs_1.3.1          ps_1.3.0          curl_3.3          testthat_2.2.1    memoise_1.1.0    
 [25] glue_1.3.1        compiler_3.6.1    desc_1.2.0        backports_1.1.5   prettyunits_1.0.2

Answer 1

Looking at the source code at https://github.com/dalejbarr/elan/blob/master/DESCRIPTION I found a potential error of format. You could try to clone the repository and debug it manually by removing the extra spaces in front on the XML package import :

DESCRIPTION file

Package: elan
Title: Read ELAN XML files
Version: 0.1
Authors@R: "Dale Barr <dalejbarr3@gmail.com> [aut, cre]"
Description: Read ELAN XML files to tidy output
Depends:
    R (>= 3.1.1),
    dplyr
Imports:
      XML,
    plyr
License: 
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 7.0.2

I tried it in a minimal package and this raise a problem (but the package still compiles without the scripts).

Alternatively you could use the XML (which this small package uses) or the xml2 (as here ) package to parse your XML files.