Internal error: The "regex_replace" function can only accept strings

[JayjeetAtGithub]

Describe the bug

On running the query below on the Clickbench multi file dataset,

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE("Referer", '^https?://(?:www.)?([^/]+)/.*$', '1') AS k, AVG(length("Referer")) AS l, COUNT(*) AS c, MIN("Referer") FROM hits WHERE "Referer" <> '' GROUP BY k HAVING COUNT(*) > 100000 ORDER BY l DESC LIMIT 25;

we get this error,

Internal error: The "regex_replace" function can only accept strings.. This was likely caused by a bug in DataFusion's code and we would welcome that you file an bug report in our issue tracker

To Reproduce

Download the data using,

 ./benchmarks/bench.sh data clickbench_partitioned

A hits_multi directory with the parquet files will be created.

Execute the above queries,

datafusion-cli -c "CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE hits STORED AS PARQUET LOCATION 'hits_multi';" "{query}"

Expected behavior

The queries should run successfully without erroring.

Additional context

Datafusion 29.0.0

[alamb]

This looks similar to #7039 which @jonahgao fixed by adding a coercion from binary --> UTF8 for comparison. I think we could do something similar here.

[alamb]

Marking as a good first issue as there is a reproducer and I think the fix should be relatively straightforward

[Weijun-H]

I am glad to fix it.