Unable to install certain R packages from GitHub

I am trying to install a package from GitHub: https://github.com/NIB-SI/seekr

However, running

devtools::install_github("ablejec/seekr")

yields the following error

>
> Downloading GitHub repo NIB-SI/pisar@HEAD Error: Failed to install
> 'pisar' from GitHub: input string 34 is invalid In addition: Warning
> message: In gsub("[^/]", "", file_list) : unable to translate
> 'NIB-SI-pisar-33d70bb/devel/_Welcome -<c0> R packages.URL' to a wide
> string
>

Other people with the same setup (RStudio running on windows) are able to install this package, but I have a sneaking suspicion the error is UTF-8 related. I am able to load the package via the downloaded package as such:

library("seekr", lib.loc = "C:/localfolder/seekr")

I have filed this issue in the GitHub repo, but I have a feeling this is such a specific error that it might not be fixable in the near future.

For reference, my SessionInfo output is:

>
> R version 4.3.0 (2023-04-21 ucrt) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
> (64-bit) Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)
>
> Matrix products: default
>
>
> locale: [1] C
>
> time zone: Europe/Paris tzcode source: internal
>
> attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils
> datasets methods base
>
> other attached packages: [1] seekr_0.1.0.9000 lubridate_1.9.2
> forcats_1.0.0 stringr_1.5.0 dplyr_1.1.2 purrr_1.0.1
> readr_2.1.4 tidyr_1.3.0 [9] tibble_3.2.1 ggplot2_3.4.2
> tidyverse_2.0.0 jsonlite_1.8.5
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] generics_0.1.3
> utf8_1.2.3 stringi_1.7.12 hms_1.1.3 digest_0.6.31
> magrittr_2.0.3 timechange_0.2.0 [8] grid_4.3.0
> pkgload_1.3.2 fastmap_1.1.1 processx_3.8.1 pkgbuild_1.4.2
> sessioninfo_1.2.2 urlchecker_1.0.1 [15] ps_1.7.5
> promises_1.2.0.1 fansi_1.0.4 scales_1.2.1 cli_3.6.1
> shiny_1.7.4 rlang_1.1.1 [22] crayon_1.5.2
> ellipsis_0.3.2 munsell_0.5.0 withr_2.5.0 remotes_2.4.2
> cachem_1.0.8 devtools_2.4.5 [29] tools_4.3.0 tzdb_0.4.0
> memoise_2.0.1 colorspace_2.1-0 httpuv_1.6.11 curl_5.0.1
> vctrs_0.6.2 [36] R6_2.5.1 mime_0.12
> lifecycle_1.0.3 fs_1.6.2 htmlwidgets_1.6.2 usethis_2.2.0
> miniUI_0.1.1.1 [43] pkgconfig_2.0.3 callr_3.7.3
> pillar_1.9.0 later_1.3.1 gtable_0.3.3 glue_1.6.2
> profvis_0.3.8 [50] Rcpp_1.0.10 tidyselect_1.2.0
> rstudioapi_0.14 xtable_1.8-4 htmltools_0.5.5 compiler_4.3.0
> prettyunits_1.1.1
>

There are some non-UTF8 characters in the repo: I forked the repo and removed them. If you install pisar from jpmam1/pisar, instead of NIB-SI/pisar, i.e.

devtools::install_github("jpmam1/pisar")

Then, reinstall seekr with:

devtools::install_github("ablejec/seekr")

It should install without issue (I'll make a pull request to the NIB-SI/pisar repo if it solves your problem).

> Any idea to why the original encoding did not work?

The English_United States.1252 locale uses Windows-1252 encoding, which is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet. That character encoding is a super set of ISO 8859-1, and it was the default in many Windows applications, so it is designed to be compatible with many older software packages.

When you switch your locale to English_United States.1252, you are changing the way that R handles and interprets character strings. Some packages may have been designed with this encoding in mind, or they may include non-UTF-8 characters that cause problems when R tries to interpret them as UTF-8.
See "How to change the locale of R?"

The fact that switching to this locale helped resolve your issue suggests that the seekr package (or possibly one of its dependencies) includes such non-UTF-8 characters.

For instance, I see Bioconductor/BiocManager, a dependency of seekr is usually used with LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252, as illustrated in issue 103.