Getting rid of `// get rid of index.html references in header`

[matthiasgomolka]

First of all I want to thank you for {distill}! I know almost nothing about html and it allows me to build useful ans pretty websites without any hassle.

What I'm doing

I'm building a small website using {distill}. One thing which is special about it is the fact that it's not meant to run in the browser, but as an https://nwjs.io/ app.

This is pretty straight-forward. I only need to copy a small package.jsonfile in to the _site directory created by {distill}. Then, I can launch the website as a local app. This works fine.

However, there is one small drawback:

The html files created from the Rmd files contain a small section with the comment // get rid of index.html references in header:

// get rid of index.html references in header
if (window.location.protocol !== "file:") {
  $('.distill-site-header a[href]').each(function(i,val) {
    $(this).attr('href', $(this).attr('href').replace("index.html", "./"));
  });
}

This section replaces all links to index.html in the top bar by ./, when I open the website as a local nw.js app. This breaks those links and the respective page cannot be found.

My hack to solve the problem

For now, my dirty workaround is this:

lapply(
  fs::dir_ls("_site", glob = "*.html"),
  function(html) {
    content <- paste(readLines(html), collapse = "\r\n")
    writeLines(
      gsub(
        '\\/\\/ get rid of index\\.html references in header(.|\\r|\\n)+?(?=\\s+\\/\\/)',
        '',
        content,
        perl = TRUE
      ),
      con = html
    )
  }
)

This simply deletes the mentioned lines of code from all html files in the _site directory.

My questions

1. Is there a simpler / better way to do this?
2. Which functionality might be affected by my hack?

[cderv]

Hi !

Which version of distill are you using ?

I think I may have solve this old issue just this week (https://github.com/rstudio/distill/issues/91) and the version release yesterday on CRAN may fix your issue. It is 1.4.

But maybe the fix is for the issue #91 is not enough for your usage.

Can you try it ?

[matthiasgomolka]

I was indeed still on version 1.3. However, updating to 1.4 did not help.

Sorry for not providing the seesionInfo() right away:

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.2 (2020-06-22)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252  LC_CTYPE=German_Germany.1252    LC_MONETARY=German_Germany.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                    LC_TIME=German_Germany.1252    

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

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] rstudioapi_0.13 knitr_1.38      xml2_1.3.3      magrittr_2.0.3  downlit_0.4.0   R6_2.5.1       
 [7] rlang_1.0.2     fastmap_1.1.0   fansi_1.0.3     stringr_1.4.0   tools_4.0.2     xfun_0.30      
[13] utf8_1.2.2      cli_3.2.0       jquerylib_0.1.4 ellipsis_0.3.2  htmltools_0.5.2 yaml_2.3.5     
[19] digest_0.6.29   lifecycle_1.0.1 tibble_3.1.6    crayon_1.5.1    bookdown_0.26   sass_0.4.1     
[25] vctrs_0.4.1     fs_1.5.2        distill_1.4     glue_1.6.2      memoise_2.0.1   cachem_1.0.6   
[31] evaluate_0.15   rmarkdown_2.13  stringi_1.7.6   pillar_1.7.0    compiler_4.0.2  bslib_0.3.1    
[37] jsonlite_1.8.0  renv_0.15.4     pkgconfig_2.0.3

[cderv]

The html files created from the Rmd files contain a small section with the comment // get rid of index.html references in header:

Can you check that this section in your HTML rendered using 1.4 has changed ? Specifically the regex should be difference that just index.html

This section replaces all links to index.html in the top bar by ./, when I open the website as a local nw.js app. This breaks those links and the respective page cannot be found.

Is there a specific behavior of nwjs.io that could help me understand what to change ?

I think we currently need this trick in JS for some purpose with the RStudio IDE. I'll try to find the original reason.

If possible, can you help me build a reproductible example with nwjs.io and using for example the demo distill template ? we could use a specific github repo as example for that. That would help me reproduce on my side, and do some test.

Thanks !

[matthiasgomolka]

Sorry for the deleay!

Updating to 1.4 did not help.

Unfortunately, I'm not an expert of nw.js at all, so I can't direct you into any direction regarding nw.js.

I'll create a GitHub Repo in the next days for you to reproduce the problem.

[matthiasgomolka]

Here is the repo: https://github.com/matthiasgomolka/distill_462

Minimal instructions are available in https://github.com/matthiasgomolka/distill_462/blob/main/index.Rmd.

You can reproduce the problem when you start the app (as described in index.Rmd) und then click on the top left Button which should lead to index.html.

Hope this helps.