How to sort a data frame by alphabetic order of a character variable in R

Question

I would like to sort a data frame by alphabetic order of a character variable in R  I ve tried to do it with the order   function but it transforms my data frame into a list  Does anyone has a clue

User · Answer

The order   function fails when the column has levels or factor  It works properly when stringsAsFactors FALSE is used in data frame creation

User · Answer

The arrange function in the plyr package makes it easy to sort by multiple columns  For example  to sort DF by ID first and then decreasing by num  you can write  plyr  arrange DF  ID  desc num

User · Answer

Use order function   set seed 1  DF  lt - data frame ID  sample letters 1 26   15  TRUE                    num   sample 1 100  15  TRUE                    random   rnorm 15                    stringsAsFactors FALSE  DF order DF   ID          ID num      random 10  b  27  0 61982575 12  e   2 -0 15579551 5   f  78  0 59390132 11  f  39 -0 05612874 1   g  50 -0 04493361 2   j  72 -0 01619026 14  j  87 -0 47815006 3   o 100  0 94383621 9   q  13 -1 98935170 8   r  66  0 07456498 13  r  39 -1 47075238 15  u  35  0 41794156 4   x  39  0 82122120 6   x  94  0 91897737 7   y  22  0 78213630   Another solution would be using orderByfunction from doBy package    gt  library doBy   gt  orderBy  ID  DF

User · Answer

sort dataframe by col sort df  lt - with df   df order sortbythiscolumn         can also sort by more than one variable  sort by col1 and then by col2 sort2 df  lt - with df  df order col1  col2         sort in reverse order sort2 df  lt - with df  df order col1  -col2

User · Answer

This really belongs with  Ramnath s answer but I can t comment as I don t have enough reputation yet  You can also use the arrange function from the dplyr package in the same way as the plyr package   library dplyr  arrange DF  ID  desc num

User · Answer

Well  I ve got no problem here    df  lt - data frame v 1 5  x sample LETTERS 1 5  5   df      v x   1 1 D   2 2 A   3 3 B   4 4 C   5 5 E  df  lt - df order df x    df      v x   2 2 A   3 3 B   4 4 C   1 1 D   5 5 E

[r] How to sort a data frame by alphabetic order of a character variable in R?

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