Set the levels of the factor a$V1 to the order
in which you want them to be sorted. E.g.,
> a <- data.frame(V1=letters[rep(4:1,2)], V2=1001:1008)
> a[do.call(order,a[c('V1','V2')]),]
V1 V2
4 a 1004
8 a 1008
3 b 1003
7 b 1007
2 c 1002
6 c 1006
1 d 1001
5 d 1005
> a$V1 <- factor(a$V1, levels=c("a","c","d","b"))
> a[do.call(order,a[c('V1','V2')]),]
V1 V2
4 a 1004
8 a 1008
2 c 1002
6 c 1006
1 d 1001
5 d 1005
3 b 1003
7 b 1007
This means that tables and plots will be ordered in
the way as well. E.g.,
> with(a, table(V1, V2))
V2
V1 1001 1002 1003 1004 1005 1006 1007 1008
a 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
c 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0
d 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
b 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0
Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On
> Behalf Of Trevor Davies
> Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 12:05 PM
> To: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: [R] sorting dataframe by arbitrary order
>
> This has been dogging me for a while. I've started making a lot of tables
> via xtable so the way I want to sort things is not always in alphabetical or
> numerical order.
>
> As an example, consider I have a dataframe as follows
>
> set.seed(100)
> a <- data.frame(V1=sample(letters[1:4],100, replace=T),V2=1:100)
>
> I know I can sort the columns first by V1 first and then by V2 by:
>
> sorted.a <- a[do.call(order,a[c('V1','V2')]),]
>
> What I want to do is exactly that but I do not want V1 sorted
> alphabetically. Rather, I would like it sorted as 'a','c','d','b'.
>
> I know I could do it with a subset, rbind function but I thought there may
> be a more elegant way?
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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