On 8/12/19 7:20 PM, Sorkin, John wrote:
I want to sort a DF, temp, on two columns, patid and time. I have searched the
internet and found code that I was able to modify to get my data sorted.
Unfortunately I don't understand how the code works. I would appreciate it if
someone could explain to me how the code works. Among other questions, despite
reading, I don't understand how with() works, nor what it does in the current
setting.
code:
data4xsort<-temp[
with( temp, order(temp[,"patid"], temp[,"time"])),
]
Thank you,
John
The `order`-function returns a numeric vector which is the length of its
inputs (and there is recycling when the inputs are of different length).
The numbers are the order in which the items would be if they were
sorted smallest to largest. There are arguments that let you control the
behavior in the case of ties. So when used in an indexing application as
seen here, it results in the dataframe returned with its rows in
ascending order based primarily on its first argument, patid, and in
case of ties on the second argument, time. If you put a minus sign in
from of the argument it the ordering is largest to smallest.
If that is code you are getting from elsewhere, you should realize that
it is somewhat redundant and you should question the level of R skills
of its author. In this code it is doing absolutely nothing. The `with(
...) is not needed because the arguments already have an unambiguous
place to get the column names. A more compact expression if you were
going to use `with` would be:
data4xsort<-temp[ with( temp, order(patid, time)), ]
But using `with` carries risks because there are sometimes confusion about
which environment it will find the named objects or columns.
Safer would be to not using it in this situation.
Your headers suggest you are using Outlook. Surely there must be a way to
specify a plain text format for outgoing emails. This is a plain text mailing
list.
David.
John David Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Medicine
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
University of Maryland School of Medicine Division of Gerontology and Geriatric
Medicine
Baltimore VA Medical Center
10 North Greene Street
GRECC (BT/18/GR)
Baltimore, MD 21201-1524
(Phone) 410-605-7119
(Fax) 410-605-7913 (Please call phone number above prior to faxing)
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