Non obvious behaviour of body add_paragraph() after an update of the package

[kapytski]

Hello to all, hello to David!
I've faced with a strange behaviour of body_add_paragraph() after the last update.
When this function is used inside an another function, at an output document it produces the backward direction of added paragraphs.
In a case of using for() - it don't.
It's the code:

require(officer)

doc<-read_docx()
foo<-function(i){
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,i)
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,paste0(""))
}
sapply(1:10,foo)
print(doc,"an issue.docx")

doc<-read_docx()
for(i in 1:10){
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,i)
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,paste0(""))
}
print(doc,"not an issue.docx")

There are results of using 2 approaches:

How to fix it?

[kapytski]

Sorry! I've forgotten to point information about my system: Win 10 (21H2), officer 0.6.0

version
platform x86_64-w64-mingw32
arch x86_64
os mingw32
crt ucrt
system x86_64, mingw32
status
major 4
minor 2.2
year 2022
month 10
day 31
svn rev 83211
language R
version.string R version 4.2.2 (2022-10-31 ucrt)
nickname Innocent and Trusting

[davidgohel]

Hello

This is related to a change/fix that happened here: a6e88f1

doc<-read_docx()
foo<-function(i){
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,i)
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,paste0("")) # no return for the function
}
sapply(1:10,foo)# results are not assigned

Cursor had issues (it was resource consuming and sometimes bugged) and we replaced it with a clean S3 system. Before it was based on an R6 class. So when you were not assigning the result, it was working but only because of a clunky implementation and it was persistent because of R6. Assignment has always been required – I am sure other strange things happened because of that.

For this reason, sapply is not a good approach, you can't sapply ggplot commands, same applies here, that's also why you can %>% operation with officer.

walk() and for() are the most natural solution to me, but I am sure there are others. So the second approach is the best to me.

doc<-read_docx() # doc is created
for(i in 1:10){
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,i) # doc is augmented and the result goes in doc
  doc<-body_add_par(doc,paste0(""))  # doc is augmented and the result goes in doc
}
print(doc,"not an issue.docx")  # doc is printed

David

[davidgohel]

Let me know if unclear so that I can update if necessary

[kapytski]

Thank you, David! For the answers and for your package!