Error while using knitR with ESS - r

Question

I messed up with something but I don't know where to look. My guess is that something happened when I updated some packages in emacs but I don't know which one exactly. Any help would be appreciated Even running a basic command like the following:
\begin{document}
<<test>>=
1+1
#
\end{document}
yield the following error
label: test
Quitting from lines 39-40 (/tmp/tmp.rnw)
Error in data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE) :
arguments imply differing number of rows: 3, 0
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In is.na(res[, 1]) :
is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type 'NULL'
2: In is.na(res) : is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type 'NULL'
and here is the stack trace:
+ Error in data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE) :
arguments imply differing number of rows: 3, 0
----------------------------------
22: stop(gettextf("arguments imply differing number of rows: %s",
paste(unique(nrows), collapse = ", ")), domain = NA)
21: data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE)
20: cbind(deparse.level, ...)
19: cbind(z[, c("line1", "col1", "line2", "col2", "text")], merge_cmd(z,
markup))
18: (if (fallback) hi_naive else hilight_one)(code, format, markup,
escape_fun)
17: highr::hilight(x, format, prompt = options$prompt, markup = opts$markup)
16: hilight_source(x, "latex", options)
15: (knit_hooks$get("source"))(src, options)
14: wrap.source(X[[1L]], ...)
13: FUN(X[[1L]], ...)
12: lapply(x, wrap, options)
11: wrap.list(res, options)
10: wrap(res, options)
9: unlist(wrap(res, options))
8: block_exec(params)
7: call_block(x)
6: process_group.block(group)
5: process_group(group)
4: withCallingHandlers(if (tangle) process_tangle(group) else process_group(group),
error = function(e) {
setwd(wd)
cat(res, sep = "\n", file = output %n% "")
message("Quitting from lines ", paste(current_lines(i),
collapse = "-"), " (", knit_concord$get("infile"),
") ")
})
3: process_file(text, output)
2: knit(input, output = output, envir = envir, quiet = quiet, encoding = encoding)
1: knit2pdf("tmp.rnw")
Update
## R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31)
## Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## locale:
## [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C
## [3] LC_TIME=en_US.utf8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8
## [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.utf8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
## [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.utf8 LC_NAME=C
## [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
## other attached packages:
## [1] knitr_1.10.5
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] compiler_3.1.2 evaluate_0.7 formatR_1.2 highr_0.5 stringr_1.0.0
## [6] tcltk_3.1.2 tools_3.1.2

Answer 1

Ran into the same problem today. For me this was fixed by upgrading the knitr packge from version 1.10.5 to version 1.11., the evaluate package from version 0.7 to version 0.7.2, the formatR package from version 0.9 to version 1.2, and the highr package from version 0.2.1 to version 0.5.
I upgraded these in order and it only worked after upgrading highr, so I suspect that this is the culprit.
Sigh, looks like it's probably time to update.packages().