Diagnose Bare Format and Markup Names in DESCRIPTION

Flags a data, markup, typesetting or query format name – JSON, HTML, XML, CSS, YAML, TOML, Markdown, LaTeX, TeX or SQL – or one of the languages CRAN packages write either way (C++, Fortran, Tcl) that appears in Title or Description without single quotes. It runs only when you call it, for a maintainer who wants the quoting consistent. CRAN accepts these names bare, so a finding here never counts against a clean result.

Usage

lab_format_names(path = ".", verbose = TRUE, desc = NULL)

Arguments

path: Character. Path to the package directory. Default: ".".
verbose: Logical. Print diagnostic output. Default: TRUE.
desc: Optional pre-parsed DESCRIPTION, as returned by base::read.dcf(). Defaults to reading it from path.

Value

checktor_check_result() with passed, issues, message.

Details

Occurrences are judged as in lab_software_names(): a name inside a quoted longer name such as 'R Markdown' or 'JSON-stat' is quoted, and so is one in a web address or a double-quoted span. A format name alone in double quotes, such as "JSON", is therefore reported by no check, by design: double quotes are the wrong kind for a name, but CRAN accepts the name with no quotes at all, so lab_description_quoted_quotes() leaves it alone too. A package can extend the list through Config/checktor/format_names in its own DESCRIPTION.

Source

Writing R Extensions asks for single quotes around "other packages and external software", and a format is not software. A census of CRAN in September 2026 found that packages accepted at new-package review in the previous 18 months wrote these names bare 62% of the time, against 28% for the languages lab_language_names() covers, so this is a matter of style and sits at opinion tier. See vignette("check-sources", package = "checktor") for how every check maps to its source.

Examples

pkg <- example_diagnose_scenario("description_examples/format_names_bad.txt",
                                 show_content = FALSE)
lab_format_names(pkg, verbose = FALSE)$issues
#> [1] "Title: JSON is not in single quotes"      
#> [2] "Title: YAML is not in single quotes"      
#> [3] "Description: HTML is not in single quotes"
#> [4] "Description: JSON is not in single quotes"
#> [5] "Description: YAML is not in single quotes"
unlink(pkg, recursive = TRUE)