[R] Work around masking of data type functions

[asfimport]

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 #9952 but we removed it before merging that PR because there were questions about whether there was a better way to implement it.

Reporter: Ian Cook / @ianmcook

Related issues:

• [R] Allow string input to as_type() (is related to)

_{Note: This issue was originally created as ARROW-12322. Please see the migration documentation for further details.}

[asfimport]

Ian Cook / @ianmcook:
See this related discussion: #9952 (comment)

[asfimport]

Ian Cook / @ianmcook:
There is a skipped test for this at 

arrow/r/tests/testthat/test-type.R

Lines 72 to 108 in 8e3f80f

	test_that("Masked data type functions still work", {
	skip("Work around masking of data type functions (ARROW-12322)")
	# Works when type function is masked
	string <- rlang::string
	expect_type_equal(
	Array$create("abc", type = string()),
	arrow::string()
	)
	rm(string)
	# Works when with non-Arrow function that returns an Arrow type
	# when the non-Arrow function has the same name as a base R function...
	str <- arrow::string
	expect_type_equal(
	Array$create("abc", type = str()),
	arrow::string()
	)
	rm(str)
	# ... and when it has the same name as an Arrow function
	type <- arrow::string
	expect_type_equal(
	Array$create("abc", type = type()),
	arrow::string()
	)
	rm(type)
	# Works with local variable whose value is an Arrow type
	type <- arrow::string()
	expect_type_equal(
	Array$create("abc", type = type),
	arrow::string()
	)
	rm(type)
	})

[asfimport]

Apache Arrow JIRA Bot:
This issue was last updated over 90 days ago, which may be an indication it is no longer being actively worked. To better reflect the current state, the issue is being unassigned per project policy. Please feel free to re-take assignment of the issue if it is being actively worked, or if you plan to start that work soon.

[github-actions]

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