[ARROW-12322] [R] Work around masking of data type functions

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: R
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/28123
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Ian Cook
• Created: 09/Apr/21 22:34
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:25

Description

There are more than two dozen data type functions in the arrow package, and they are named very generically, so they represent a large surface area for potential masking problems, which are likely to occur in user environments, not in our CI. If these masking errors do occur, they will probably give frustratingly unhelpful error messages. This happened to me with rlang::string(). The error was:

Error in is_integerish(x) : argument "x" is missing, with no default

This can be worked around with some non-standard eval magic.

I implemented a working version of this in https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/9952 but we removed it before merging that PR because there were questions about whether there was a better way to implement it.

Issue Links

• is related to: ARROW-12908 [R] Allow string input to as_type()