write.csv tibble: unimplemented type 'list' in 'EncodeElement' error

[RickPack]

I am seeing in Windows OS:
Error in write.table(starwars, "starwars.csv", col.names = NA, sep = ",", :
unimplemented type 'list' in 'EncodeElement'

when I use write.csv() on tibbles. I recently did a bunch of package updates and only saw the error afterwards.

library(dplyr)
write.csv(starwars, "starwars.csv")

sessionInfo()
R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)

Matrix products: default

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

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

other attached packages:
[1] dplyr_0.7.8

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_1.0.0 crayon_1.3.4 assertthat_0.2.0 R6_2.3.0 magrittr_1.5 pillar_1.3.1
[7] rlang_0.3.1 data.table_1.12.0 rstudioapi_0.9.0 bindrcpp_0.2.2 tools_3.5.2 glue_1.3.0
[13] purrr_0.3.0 yaml_2.2.0 compiler_3.5.2 pkgconfig_2.0.2 bindr_0.1.1 tidyselect_0.2.5
[19] tibble_2.0.1

[cderv]

starwars is a special tibble with list columns. (see last three)

dplyr::glimpse(dplyr::starwars)
#> Observations: 87
#> Variables: 13
#> $ name       <chr> "Luke Skywalker", "C-3PO", "R2-D2", "Darth Vader", ...
#> $ height     <int> 172, 167, 96, 202, 150, 178, 165, 97, 183, 182, 188...
#> $ mass       <dbl> 77.0, 75.0, 32.0, 136.0, 49.0, 120.0, 75.0, 32.0, 8...
#> $ hair_color <chr> "blond", NA, NA, "none", "brown", "brown, grey", "b...
#> $ skin_color <chr> "fair", "gold", "white, blue", "white", "light", "l...
#> $ eye_color  <chr> "blue", "yellow", "red", "yellow", "brown", "blue",...
#> $ birth_year <dbl> 19.0, 112.0, 33.0, 41.9, 19.0, 52.0, 47.0, NA, 24.0...
#> $ gender     <chr> "male", NA, NA, "male", "female", "male", "female",...
#> $ homeworld  <chr> "Tatooine", "Tatooine", "Naboo", "Tatooine", "Alder...
#> $ species    <chr> "Human", "Droid", "Droid", "Human", "Human", "Human...
#> $ films      <list> [<"Revenge of the Sith", "Return of the Jedi", "Th...
#> $ vehicles   <list> [<"Snowspeeder", "Imperial Speeder Bike">, <>, <>,...
#> $ starships  <list> [<"X-wing", "Imperial shuttle">, <>, <>, "TIE Adva...

I don't think write.csv can handle list columns.

There is a discussion in readr about writing list column.

Also this dataset appeared in 0.7.0 with list columns. So issue should have been observed since then.

if you try to use write.csv on a tibble without list columns it should work.

[hadley]

Thanks @cderv!

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