How to cast a column to another type with just duckplyr

[nbc]

Hi,

I think I miss something big but I can't find a way to cast a column to another type with duckplyr, since as.character / as.integer / ... don't work.

I know I can fall back to dplyr or use raw duckdb SQL as shown below, but that feels a bit cumbersome.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(
  library(duckplyr)
)

dtb <- duckdb_tibble(a = c(1L,2L))
dtb |>
  as_tbl() |>
  mutate(char = sql("CAST(a AS VARCHAR)"))
#> # Source:   SQL [?? x 2]
#> # Database: DuckDB v1.3.1 [unknown@Linux 6.8.0-60-generic:R 4.5.1//tmp/Rtmp2I3jtn/duckplyr/duckplyrc3a642bafa03.duckdb]
#>       a char 
#>   <int> <chr>
#> 1     1 1    
#> 2     2 2

^{Created on 2025-08-02 with reprex v2.1.1}

Regards