Possible bad interaction between glue and gganimate causing errors in animate() and anim_save()

[jmcastagnetto]

There seems to be a problem when using glue to interpolate values from a data.frame variable if we also want to make an animation with gganimate, perhaps is some parsing of "{variables}" in gganimate when generating the temporary frames. Found this problem when generating some animations recently

Here I am using an example using the Palmer Penguins dataset. First we generate two identical static plots, with and without using glue, both work

library(tidyverse)
library(gganimate)
library(palmerpenguins)
data(penguins)

p0 <- ggplot(
  penguins %>%
    mutate(
      sex = as.character(sex) %>% replace_na("unknown"),
      coolness = as.factor(sample(1:5, nrow(penguins), replace = TRUE))
    ) %>%
    filter(!is.na(flipper_length_mm)),
  aes(x = bill_length_mm, y = flipper_length_mm,
      group = species, color = coolness)
) +
  labs(
    title = "Palmer Penguines dataset - Species: {closest_state}",
    subtitle = paste0(
      "Island(s): ",
      origin = paste(unique(penguins$island), collapse = ", ")
    )
  ) +
  facet_wrap(~sex)

p1 <- p0 +
  labs(caption = "No glue") +
  geom_text(aes(label = paste0("[", coolness, "]")), show.legend = FALSE)

p2 <- p0 +
  labs(caption = "With glue") +
  geom_text(aes(label = glue::glue("[{coolness}]")), show.legend = FALSE)

Here is p1

And p2 (identical)

Now, when if we try to generate an animation, the one using p2 fails:

# This code works ---------------------------------------------------------
anim1 <- p1 +
  transition_states(
    states = species
  )

animate(
  anim1,
  width = 600,
  height = 300,
  nframes = 30,
  fps = 10
)

# This code generates an error --------------------------------------------
anim2 <- p2 +
  transition_states(
    states = species
  )

animate(
  anim2,
  width = 600,
  height = 300,
  nframes = 30,
  fps = 10
)

The last part above gives the following error on my system:

For reference, here is a gif generated from anim1

anim_save(
  animation = anim1,
  filename = "penguins_animation.gif",
  width = 600,
  height = 300,
  nframes = 30,
  fps = 10
)

And here is my sessionInfo()

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/liblapack.so.3

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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

other attached packages:
 [1] palmerpenguins_0.1.0 gganimate_1.0.7      forcats_0.5.0       
 [4] stringr_1.4.0        dplyr_1.0.2          purrr_0.3.4         
 [7] readr_1.4.0          tidyr_1.1.2          tibble_3.0.4        
[10] ggplot2_3.3.2        tidyverse_1.3.0     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.5        plyr_1.8.6        pillar_1.4.7      compiler_4.0.3   
 [5] cellranger_1.1.0  dbplyr_2.0.0      prettyunits_1.1.1 progress_1.2.2   
 [9] tools_4.0.3       digest_0.6.27     jsonlite_1.7.1    lubridate_1.7.9.2
[13] lifecycle_0.2.0   gtable_0.3.0      pkgconfig_2.0.3   rlang_0.4.9      
[17] reprex_0.3.0      cli_2.2.0         DBI_1.1.0         rstudioapi_0.13  
[21] yaml_2.2.1        haven_2.3.1       withr_2.3.0       xml2_1.3.2       
[25] httr_1.4.2        fs_1.5.0          generics_0.1.0    vctrs_0.3.5      
[29] rsthemes_0.1.0    hms_0.5.3         grid_4.0.3        tidyselect_1.1.0 
[33] glue_1.4.2        R6_2.5.0          gifski_0.8.6      fansi_0.4.1      
[37] readxl_1.3.1      farver_2.0.3      tweenr_1.0.1      modelr_0.1.8     
[41] magrittr_2.0.1    backports_1.2.0   scales_1.1.1      ellipsis_0.3.1   
[45] rvest_0.3.6       assertthat_0.2.1  colorspace_2.0-0  labeling_0.4.2   
[49] stringi_1.5.3     munsell_0.5.0     broom_0.7.2       crayon_1.3.4

[jmcastagnetto]

Problem still persists as of 2021-03-07

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/liblapack.so.3

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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

other attached packages:
 [1] palmerpenguins_0.1.0 gganimate_1.0.7      forcats_0.5.1       
 [4] stringr_1.4.0        dplyr_1.0.5          purrr_0.3.4         
 [7] readr_1.4.0          tidyr_1.1.3          tibble_3.1.0        
[10] ggplot2_3.3.3        tidyverse_1.3.0     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] progress_1.2.2    tidyselect_1.1.0  haven_2.3.1       colorspace_2.0-0 
 [5] vctrs_0.3.6       generics_0.1.0    utf8_1.1.4        rlang_0.4.10     
 [9] pillar_1.5.1      glue_1.4.2        withr_2.4.1       DBI_1.1.1        
[13] tweenr_1.0.1      dbplyr_2.1.0      modelr_0.1.8      readxl_1.3.1     
[17] plyr_1.8.6        lifecycle_1.0.0   munsell_0.5.0     gtable_0.3.0     
[21] cellranger_1.1.0  rvest_0.3.6       labeling_0.4.2    fansi_0.4.2      
[25] gifski_0.8.7      broom_0.7.5       Rcpp_1.0.6        scales_1.1.1     
[29] backports_1.2.1   debugme_1.1.0     jsonlite_1.7.2    farver_2.1.0     
[33] fs_1.5.0          hms_1.0.0         stringi_1.5.3     grid_4.0.4       
[37] cli_2.3.1         tools_4.0.4       magrittr_2.0.1    crayon_1.4.1     
[41] pkgconfig_2.0.3   ellipsis_0.3.1    xml2_1.3.2        prettyunits_1.1.1
[45] reprex_1.0.0      lubridate_1.7.10  assertthat_0.2.1  httr_1.4.2       
[49] rstudioapi_0.13   R6_2.5.0          compiler_4.0.4   

In case you want to grab the sample code above, it is at: https://github.com/jmcastagnetto/misc-viz/blob/main/20201205-bad-interaction-glue-gganimate.R