How to solve a rendering error

[beyond2060]

Description

All of the pages on my website render apart from the main index.qmd file, which has a couple of listings on it. It gives the error as shown below. The problem is that I haven't made any changes to the file recently, so it must be one of the other pages causing it, possibly due to the listings. But I don't know which page, and it is a large site, which makes it very difficult to solve this problem. How do I go about solving this?

---

**quarto render index.qmd**

ERROR: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split')

Stack trace:
    at eval (eval at <anonymous> (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:3925:16), <anonymous>:23:22)
    at renderEjs (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:90595:18)
    at templateMarkdownHandler (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:97842:28)
    at markdownHandler (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:98795:24)
    at file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:98697:31
    at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
    at listingHtmlDependencies (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:98696:24)
    at async Object.formatExtras (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:99025:45)
    at async runPandoc (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:76573:63)
    at async renderPandoc (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:78003:26)

[mcanouil]

Could you properly format your post using code blocks for code and terminal outputs? Thanks.
If your code contains code blocks, you need to enclose it using more backticks, i.e., usually four ````.
See https://quarto.org/bug-reports.html#formatting-make-githubs-markdown-work-for-us.

The method is the same for everything, you remove pieces one by one to narrow down where the issue comes from.
Based on the error you likely have a malformed YAML entry somewhere.

Because nothing was shared (repository?), it's unfortunately impossible to help more than that.

[cscheid]

Thanks for the report - Quarto should be providing more information than it is, so I consider this a Quarto bug. But I would like to be able to reproduce it before fixing.

What Quarto version are you running? I can't seem to identify it from the line numbers in quarto.js.

Also, do you have a link to a git repo that you can share?

[beyond2060]

Thanks for your quick responses. Sorry I will share more next time (I have my GitHub repository set to private because I do a lot of experimenting with my Quarto instance and I'm afraid of accidentally sharing keys, but I'll sort that out).

I finally worked this out. In one of my subdirectories I had accidentally created an empty filename.qmd file. I think that was causing the listing on the home page to throw an error.
Quarto version 1.6.33

[mcanouil]

I finally worked this out. In one of my subdirectories I had accidentally created an empty filename.qmd file. I think that was causing the listing on the home page to throw an error.
Quarto version 1.6.33

If you manage to make a simple reproducible example which validate your assumption that would be helpful.

I only quickly tried:

quarto create project blog issue-11499 Issue-11499
mkdir -p posts/empty
touch posts/empty/index.qmd
quarto render

This only produced a warning (no crash/error) that the listing is missing metadata. (using latest 1.6 RC)

[beyond2060]

Ok I've investigated this some more and have a minimal site set up that causes the error. I am using listing templates so have my own .ejs files, and I expect that is the cause of the error and why you are not seeing it. Do you still want to look at it? I don't want to waste your time.

[cscheid]

Yes, I'd love to see it. I'd like Quarto to provide a more meaningful error message in this case so that it becomes easier for other folks to solve similar problems they might find.

[beyond2060]

Here you go:
https://github.com/beyond2060/quarto-bug-reproduction
If you do
Quarto render index.qmd
you should get the error. (I just updated to quarto-1.6.37 and I still get the error).

[cderv]

I think this is because you do use item.title.split()
https://github.com/beyond2060/quarto-bug-reproduction/blob/09e70356eac59bc03c474cd35467abe617ce7252/js/all-table.ejs#L14C6-L14C135

but your document does not have a title
https://github.com/beyond2060/quarto-bug-reproduction/blob/main/experimenting/2024-11-22T175152Z/index.qmd

so item.title is undefined; Hence the error from EJS rendering

Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split')

Add a title to your listing document, and the error will disappear

[cscheid]

Tracking the error-improvement enhancement here: #11529

[beyond2060]

Thanks guys, amazing support. ⭐️