Different behavior of tidyr::nest on different systems and package / R versions

Question

Recently I have updated to tidyr version 1.0.0 on two different machines (PC and mac) running slightly different R and package versions.

The print output of tiydr::nest now shows slight differences. My question seems related to this post, but is not. I am not interested in how to create identical results between the new nest and nest_legacy (this difference is what the post above is about). I am rather interested in why different print outputs occur, although the same tidyr version is used, and how I can fix this (the print output of my PC doesn't look correct).

Here is the output on my mac:

library(tidyr)

nested_tbl_mac <- iris %>%
  tidyr::nest(data = c(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length, Petal.Width)) 

nested_tbl_mac
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#>   Species              data
#>         >
#> 1 setosa           [50 × 4]
#> 2 versicolor       [50 × 4]
#> 3 virginica        [50 × 4]

nested_tbl_mac[[2]] %>% class 
#> [1] "vctrs_list_of" "vctrs_vctr"

^{Created on 2019-11-25 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

Here is the output from my pc:

library(tidyr)

nested_tbl_pc <- iris %>% 
  tidyr::nest(data = c(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length, Petal.Width))

nested_tbl_pc
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#>   Species    data                                                          
#>                                                    
#> 1 setosa     5.1, 4.9, 4.7, 4.6, 5.0, 5.4, 4.6, 5.0, 4.4, 4.9, 5.4, 4.8, 4~
#> 2 versicolor 7.0, 6.4, 6.9, 5.5, 6.5, 5.7, 6.3, 4.9, 6.6, 5.2, 5.0, 5.9, 6~
#> 3 virginica  6.3, 5.8, 7.1, 6.3, 6.5, 7.6, 4.9, 7.3, 6.7, 7.2, 6.5, 6.4, 6~

nested_tbl_pc[[2]] %>% class
#> [1] "vctrs_list_of" "vctrs_vctr"

^{Created on 2019-11-25 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

It seems like a printing issue to me. However, unlike in this post here I haven’t tweaked my printing options on neither of my machines.

The only packages I have loaded are tidyr and all base packages.

(.packages())
#> [1] "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets"  "methods"  
#> [7] "base"

Finally, here a comparison between the versions of tidyr and all packages imported by tidyr on both of my machines (last row shows the R version):

#>    package    version_pc version_mac
#>                      
#>  1 tidyr      1.0.0      1.0.0      
#>  2 dplyr      0.8.3      0.8.3      
#>  3 ellipsis   0.3.0      0.2.0.1    
#>  4 glue       1.3.0      1.3.1      
#>  5 magrittr   1.5        1.5        
#>  6 purrr      0.3.2      0.3.3      
#>  7 Rcpp       1.0.2      1.0.2      
#>  8 rlang      0.4.1      0.4.0      
#>  9 stringi    1.2.4      1.2.2      
#> 10 tibble     2.1.1      2.1.3      
#> 11 tidyselect 0.2.5      0.2.5      
#> 12 utils      3.5.1      3.5.0      
#> 13 vctrs      0.2.0      0.2.0      
#> 14 lifecycle  0.1.0      0.1.0      
#> 15 R.Version  3.5.1      3.5.0

Update: I have now updated all packages imported by tidyr on my PC which had smaller version numbers than my mac (glue, purrr and tibble) and this does not solve the problem. I would like to refrain from downgrading to lower versions on my PC for ellipsis, rlang, stringi and utils.

Solution: As Matt hinted at in his answer, the cause of the problem was rooted in the pillar package. Updating from version 1.2.1 to 1.4.2 solved the printing issue. I approached the problem as a tidyr issue, but it actually was an issue of how (nested) tibbles get printed. Therefore, I should have looked at the dependencies of the tibble package as well.

Matt · Accepted Answer

I'm not 100% on this, but I think this is due to the printing options of pillar, and according to this you can override the printing which may produce what you're looking for:

print.tbl_df <- function(x, ...) {
  print.data.frame(x, ...)
  invisible(x)
}

Different behavior of tidyr::nest on different systems and package / R versions

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