`fread` can't seem to use `col.names` and `colClasses` together

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Reproduce the MWE using data.table::fread with col.names and colClasses together, then trace the fread argument handling that produces the reported column-name error. Done means the example runs without error and returns columns a and b with character types; add or update a regression test for this combination.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

fread

I can't seem to use col.names and colClasses together in data.table::fread. See MWE

data.table::fwrite(cars, "cars.csv", col.names = FALSE)
data.table::fread("cars.csv", col.names = c("a","b"),
                  colClasses = list(a="character", b = "character"))
```

which produces the error

> Error in data.table::fread("cars.csv", col.names = c("a", "b"), colClasses = list(a = "character",  : 
>   Column name 'character' in colClasses[[1]] not found
Dominant language
R
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