How can I get the gene_biotypes for a given gene symbol in R please? Preferably using Ensembl (which in turn is using Havana annotation).

Thank you.

You can get that information using ensembldb:

Assuming you're working with human annotations and want to use Ensembl release 86:

library(EnsDb.Hsapiens.v86)
edb <- EnsDb.Hsapiens.v86

## Get the transcript biotype for the gene SMC4
genes(edb, filter = ~ symbol == "SMC4", return.type = "DataFrame")
DataFrame with 1 row and 10 columns
          gene_id   gene_name   gene_biotype gene_seq_start gene_seq_end
      <character> <character>    <character>      <integer>    <integer>
1 ENSG00000113810        SMC4 protein_coding      160399274    160434962
     seq_name seq_strand seq_coord_system      symbol entrezid
  <character>  <integer>      <character> <character>   <list>
1           3          1       chromosome        SMC4    10051

With return.type you can specify what return object the function should return (data.frame, DataFrame or the default GRanges). You could also define columns = "gene_biotype" to just return the biotype, gene ID and symbol:

genes(edb, filter = ~ symbol == "SMC4", return.type = "DataFrame", columns = "gene_biotype")
DataFrame with 1 row and 3 columns
    gene_biotype         gene_id      symbol
     <character>     <character> <character>
1 protein_coding ENSG00000113810        SMC4

For other Ensembl releases and species you can get the respective EnsDb database from AnnotationHub (see e.g. ensembldb vignette for details).