DataFrame eltypes error without using eltypes

Hello All

I am trying to run Julia code on a Linux cluster that works flawlessly on my personal machine. The MWE that fails for me:

using Pkg
Pkg.activate("/home/path/JuliaEnv/") #Activate Environment
using DataFrames
println("BeginTest")
dummyDF = DataFrame([String],["String"],1)
println("EndTest")

fails with:

Activating environment at `~/path/JuliaEnv/Project.toml`
ERROR: LoadError: ArgumentError: `DataFrame` constructor with passed eltypes is not supported. Pass explicitly created columns to a `DataFrame` constructor instead.
Stacktrace:
[1] DataFrame(::Array{DataType,1}, ::Array{String,1}, ::Int64; makeunique::Bool) at path/.julia/packages/DataFrames/nxjiD/src/dataframe/dataframe.jl:380
[2] DataFrame(::Array{DataType,1}, ::Array{String,1}, ::Int64) at path/.julia/packages/DataFrames/nxjiD/src/dataframe/dataframe.jl:380
[3] top-level scope at file.jl:7
in expression starting at file.jl:7
BeginTest

I am not even using the eltypes command here and it fails. Ironically, the full script uses DataFrame(XLSX.readtable("ExcelFile.xlsx", "Sheet1"; infer_eltypes=true)...) at some previous stage without any problems, but it somehow fails to construct any DataFrames (which I need). This is on Julia 1.5.4, which I have reinstalled, I also tried 1.6.1, deleting various folders in Julia, recompiling, reinstating the environment etc, nothing worked.

Any help on how to resolve this is much appreciated, I don’t want to rewrite everything in Python just so I can use the cluster…

I forget which constructors are supported in which version of DataFrames, but this looks to me like the versions of DataFrames on the cluster and your personnel machine are different?

Indeed DataFrame([Int, Int], [:a, :b]) or similar (first a list of types, then a list of names) was removed in recent versions. Instead you can do DataFrame(a=Int[], b=Int[]), or if the names and types are variables you can do something like DataFrame(colnames .=> [type[] for type in types]).

Can you give the code at line 7 of file.jl?

Ah yes - I think the error message is misleading, but indeed this way of constructing DataFrames seems to not be supported with this DataFrames version.

Yes using this construction method did the trick - line 7 is actually the DataFrame([String],[“String”],1) line from the MWE, but I omitted some commented out lines causing the discrepency between error message and MWE.