How does the order() function in R work for character vectors?

Asked Nov 16 '15 at 06:33

Active Nov 16 '15 at 06:33

Viewed 47 times

Here my R code:

>vec <- c("bbb","zzz","aaa")  
>order(vec)  
[1] 3 1 2  
>vec[order(vec)]  
[1] "aaa" "bbb" "zzz"

An order of 3,1,2 should have resulted in "zzz" "aaa" "bbb". However I get "aaa" "bbb" "ccc". This is the correct order, just does not match with what the order() returned originally

asked Nov 16 '15 at 06:33

Amitab

3

Order returns the indices to get the sorted order. The third one ("aaa") goes first, so `3` is the first index. Compare to `rank()`. – Gregor Thomas Nov 16 '15 at 06:35
Thanks. That makes sense – Amitab Nov 16 '15 at 06:40
1

It's a pity that duplicate suffers from showing an example vector of length 50 when one of length 4 or 5 would do the job. – thelatemail Nov 16 '15 at 06:45

How does the order() function in R work for character vectors?

0 Answers0