Error thrown within ddply crashes R

Question

I'm running into an issue where plyr consistently crashes when an error is thrown from the supplied function

> require(plyr)
Loading required package: plyr
Warning message:
package ‘plyr’ was built under R version 3.0.2 
> df <- data.frame(group=c("A","A","B","B"), num=c(11,22,33,44))
> ddply(df, .(group), function(x) {x})
  group num
1     A  11
2     A  22
3     B  33
4     B  44

> ddply(df, .(group), function(x) {stop("badness")})
called from: (function ()
{
     .rs.breakOnError(TRUE)
})()
Error in .fun(piece, ...) : badness
Browse[1]>
# Crashes immediately

Is anyone aware of why this may be occuring and how to prevent it (other than avoiding errors of course)?

(I'm running R 3.0.1 on platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit) through RStudio 0.98.274 under Windows 7)

EDIT As a workaround, I am redirecting any errors as warnings which avoids the crashes

ddply(df, .(group), function(x) tryCatch(stop("badness"), error = function(e) warning(e)) )

Will report what happens here if I manage to align the plyr and R versions.

Nor can I on ubuntu and R 3.0.2 Have you run only those four commands in a clean R session? `R --vanilla` — Justin, Nov 12 '13 at 15:44
@Justin this was in a fresh session so no other commands, although I realised I omitted the warning message displayed after loading plyr, edited the question to reflect this now. — ScarletPumpernickel, Nov 12 '13 at 15:49
Maybe the first thing to try, then, given the warning would be to upgrade to 3.0.2? — joran, Nov 12 '13 at 16:06
@Justin certainly would if I could, but can't due to network security at work. But I am working on getting a plyr version that is guaranteed 3.0.1-compatible somehow... — ScarletPumpernickel, Nov 12 '13 at 16:31
IT idiots FTL! Ain't it amazing that somehow they allowed Rstudio but not upgrades to same? — Carl Witthoft, Nov 12 '13 at 16:38
do you still have this problem? I have exactly the same behavior on Mac, latest versions of R and plyr. — Lionel Henry, Jul 27 '14 at 20:25

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 28 '14 at 07:48

2

I got the same issue on R 3.1.1 and plyr 1.8.1.

To fix it, I just reinstalled the package from source.

install.packages("plyr", type = "source")

answered Jul 28 '14 at 07:48

Lionel Henry

6,652
27
33

Actually I just reinstalled the binary to see if that really was the problem, but I couldn't reproduce the bug. So if you have these crashes, just reinstall plyr from source or from the binary and see how it goes. – Lionel Henry Jul 28 '14 at 07:56
I was getting a totally different error related to plyr, and this solution fixed that also. Must be a problem with the "normal" installed version! Thanks – Luke Mar 10 '15 at 11:07

Error thrown within ddply crashes R

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