XML error when rendering site and article about distill HOT 10 CLOSED

In case anyone else comes across this, I had the same issue due to not including a description line in the YAML for a post. Even a blank description would cause the node_append_content problem.

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I just ran into this issue, and also fixed it by using an empty string for the description of a blog post. e.g. the new YAML is:

title: "Title of the blog post"
description: ""

It might be nice to allow YAML headers without a description field. Alternatively, perhaps this should be better documented that the description field is basically required for the site to build correctly?

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I am now getting a similar error when adding a new post such as radix::create_post('testing'). When this is knitted I get the error:

Error in node_append_content(x$node, value) : 
  Expecting a single string value: [type=list; extent=0].
Calls: <Anonymous> ... <Anonymous> -> xml_text<-.xml_node -> node_append_content
Execution halted

If I add draft: true to the YAML header the document will knit but the blog site still will not build.

I have updated rstudio to 1.2.1070, and radix to 0.5.0.9001

R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 10240)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                      
[5] LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252    

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

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] compiler_3.5.1   here_0.1         backports_1.1.2 
 [4] magrittr_1.5     rprojroot_1.3-2  tools_3.5.1     
 [7] htmltools_0.3.6  yaml_2.2.0       Rcpp_0.12.17    
[10] radix_0.5.0.9001 stringi_1.2.3    rmarkdown_1.10  
[13] knitr_1.20       stringr_1.3.1    digest_0.6.18   
[16] evaluate_0.10.1 

from distill.

We need a link to the source code for your site in order to debug this further (we can't reproduce this error locally so there is something in your particular configuration we need to be able to see the error)

from distill.

Apologies. While trying to make a minimal reproducible example (removing posts and attempting rebuilding) I discovered a single post that was causing the issue. I'm not sure but it seemed to have corrupted the sitemap.xml or the posts.json file.

Once the site built without the offending post I was able to then add all the posts back (including the offender). I did not need to change anything in the post but I did knit it again.

Thanks for the quick response, I should have started my question with the reprex.

:)

from distill.

Okay, great. If you do have a copy of that post around it would be interesting for us to take a look to see whether there is a way we can defend against this condition.

from distill.

I have uploaded the Rmd as a gist.

I did not need to modify this file to fix the problem just re-knit it. A required package (sf) had disappeared from my system causing an error. But before this the rmd had rendered without issue. Perhaps the problem was that a complete .html file existed in and _site/posts and a record of the post was in sitemap.xml ??

In a normal workflow this might not happen. But I was moving many posts from previous blogging structure and so missed the error.

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Okay, thanks. That helps a lot. I don't think there's anything for us to change right now.

from distill.

FYI I ran into this same error a couple of times when porting old blog posts. I'm not sure what the exact cause was, but deleting the docs folder and all compiled HTML allowed everything to build. It seemed to be related to adding (or modifying?) a post dated earlier than the most recent one, but there must be more to it as I couldn't reproduce it with a simple example.
If I run into it again I'll have a closer look at the output files to figure out what's going on.

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In case anyone else comes across this, I had the same issue due to not including a description line in the YAML for a post. Even a blank description would cause the node_append_content problem.

The error is very non-descriptive. Had the same issue and adding the description in YAML fixed it. Thanks!

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