arrange() doesn't recognize column name parameter

Question

Within R, I use dplyr and more specifically arrange(). Somehow the arrange function doesn\'t work as expected.

In the example

Answer 1

An update is necessary to the good answer by @avid_useR because 'rlang::parse_quosure' is deprecated now.

To give a short answer to the question how to make 'dplyr::arrange' accept a string or variable containing a string for the column name to sort, you can do:

target_column = rlang::sym('mean_age')
df %>% group_by(state) %>% arrange(!!target_column)

OR as one-liner (if you only need to use it once):

df %>% group_by(state) %>% arrange(!!rlang::sym(target_column))