as.character.formula breaks base R

[mayer79]

Loading the package breaks R's behaviour of as.character.default, which is not too convenient.

as.character(.~.) # "~" "." "."
library(formula.tools)
as.character(.~.) # ". ~ ."

Do you see an easy way to avoid this?

[Scott-Coggeshall]

I recently encountered this issue as well. Having formula.tools attached or loaded via a namespace breaks the oneway.test function from the base R stats package.

Example

# start with fresh R session in Rstudio

sessionInfo()

# R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
# Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
# Running under: Windows Server x64 (build 14393)

# Matrix products: default

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

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

# loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
# [1] compiler_4.0.4 tools_4.0.4    yaml_2.2.1  

# set up fake data for a simple one-way ANOVA

set.seed(23)


fake_data <- data.frame(x = rbinom(100, 1, .5), y = rnorm(100))




# running oneway.test, output is fine

oneway.test(y ~ x, data = fake_data)

# > oneway.test(y ~ x, data = fake_data)
#	One-way analysis of means (not assuming equal variances)
#
# data:  y and x
# F = 0.010084, num df = 1.000, denom df = 96.939, p-value = 0.9202
# > 

# attach formula.tools
library(formula.tools)

# re-run oneway.test

oneway.test(y ~ x, data = fake_data)

# running oneway.test now throws error
# > oneway.test(y ~ x, data = fake_data)
# Error in oneway.test(y ~ x, data = fake_data) : 
#  a two-sided formula is required
# > 

This occurs because oneway.test does some error-checking prior to running the ANOVA that relies on as.character returning a vector of length 3 when given a two-sided formula. Anything other than that and it throws an error.

[mayer79]

User contributed packages should not break base R. Any chance this could be fixed?

[mayer79]

Is this project dead?

[ctbrown]

No. I just have no time to fix it. Chris

…

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[mayer79]

This is a pity.