lines not showing in mapview when they show in tmap

[floswald]

I have a very odd problem that I cannot get a grip on. tmap correctly displays some linestrings, while mapview does not. I am sharing the dataframe here as object t https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ye672mfbcaja7mx1dioeo/shape.Rds?rlkey=ykf3ftutyxgn17s98bjauhsk1&dl=0

tm_shape(t) +  tm_lines()

mapview:

mapview::mapview(t)

What is really weird is that I can plot the lines if I filter them explicity. See how the blue line well below Bordeaux now is plotted.

t %>% filter(id == "40014") %>% mapview::mapview()

thanks for any help with this!

[tim-salabim]

Hi, there's an empty linestring in your data. Apparently, tmap will exclude those while mapview does not, meaning that it will not plot data after the empty linestring:

library(sf)
library(mapview)

t = readRDS("/home/tim/Downloads/shape.Rds")

st_is_empty(t) |>
  sum()

which(st_is_empty(t))

mapview(t[-which(st_is_empty(t)), ])

we should probably have a proper warning about this somewhere...

[floswald]

argh! should have thought of that. thanks so much!

[tim-salabim]

No worries, I'll leave this open as a reminder to implement some warning at some stage

[StefanoMezzini]

A similar issue occurs with empty point geometries. If I try plotting an sf data.frame with point data and at least one empty point geometry, mapview() only plots the points before the empty geometries. All points after the empty geometry are ignored.

Here's a reprex:

library(sf)
library(dplyr)
library(mapview)

locs_df <- data.frame(i = 1:5, x = rnorm(5), y = rnorm(5, mean = 10))
locs_full <- st_as_sf(locs_df, coords = c('x', 'y'), crs = 'EPSG:4326')

plot(locs_full, axes = TRUE, pch = 19, main = 'All') # plots all 5 locations
mapview(locs_full) # plots all 5 locations

# set the geometry for point 3 to be empty
locs_nas <- locs_full
locs_nas$geometry[3] <- NULL
locs_nas # point 3 has empty geometry
## Simple feature collection with 5 features and 1 field (with 1 geometry empty)
## Geometry type: POINT
## Dimension:     XY
## Bounding box:  xmin: -0.8483368 ymin: 10.11624 xmax: 0.8383116 ymax: 10.55885
## Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84
##   i                    geometry
## 1 1 POINT (-0.6114665 10.39202)
## 2 2 POINT (-0.8483368 10.11624)
## 3 3                 POINT EMPTY
## 4 4  POINT (0.6337114 10.55885)
## 5 5  POINT (0.8383116 10.31163)

plot(locs_nas, axes = TRUE, pch = 19) # plots all 4 non-empty locations
mapview(locs_nas) # only plots 2 locations

Plots from the full set of locations:

Plots from the locations with an empty geometry:

Session info:

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
Running under: macOS Tahoe 26.2

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: America/Vancouver
tzcode source: internal

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

other attached packages:
[1] mapview_2.11.4 dplyr_1.2.0    sf_1.0-24     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] jsonlite_2.0.0          compiler_4.5.2          tidyselect_1.2.1        Rcpp_1.1.1             
 [5] leaflet_2.2.3           jquerylib_0.1.4         scales_1.4.0            png_0.1-8              
 [9] fastmap_1.2.0           lattice_0.22-7          R6_2.6.1                generics_0.1.4         
[13] classInt_0.4-11         satellite_1.0.6         htmlwidgets_1.6.4       tibble_3.3.1.9004      
[17] leaflet.providers_2.0.0 units_1.0-0             DBI_1.2.3.9038          RColorBrewer_1.1-3     
[21] pillar_1.11.1.9006      rlang_1.1.7             sp_2.2-0                terra_1.8-93           
[25] cli_3.6.5               magrittr_2.0.4          class_7.3-23            crosstalk_1.2.2        
[29] digest_0.6.39           grid_4.5.2              leafem_0.2.5            rstudioapi_0.18.0      
[33] base64enc_0.1-6         lifecycle_1.0.5         vctrs_0.7.1             KernSmooth_2.23-26     
[37] proxy_0.4-29            glue_1.8.0              farver_2.1.2            raster_3.6-32          
[41] codetools_0.2-20        stats4_4.5.2            e1071_1.7-17            tools_4.5.2            
[45] pkgconfig_2.0.3         htmltools_0.5.9