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

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 ?

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

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))

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))

Use order function:

set.seed(1)
DF <- 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:

> library(doBy)
> orderBy(~ID, DF)

#sort dataframe by col
sort.df <- with(df,  df[order(sortbythiscolumn) , ])

#can also sort by more than one variable: sort by col1 and then by col2
sort2.df <- with(df, df[order(col1, col2) , ])

#sort in reverse order
sort2.df <- with(df, df[order(col1, -col2) , ])