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I have a vector of strings in R that follow this format: 1:A. So let's say I have a vector with strings 

x = c("1:A", "201:A", "2:A")

I want to sort through this vector so it becomes 

["1:A" "2:A" "201:A"]

Is there a function that is capable of this in R? I have tried 

mixedsort(x, decreasing = FALSE)

from the gtools library, but it still doesn't seem to completely work very well when this vector is scaled up to include the letter B as well. Any ideas?

mrk
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zorian15
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  • what are your example data and expected result when the "vector is scaled up to include the letter B as well". – dww Jun 27 '17 at 18:10

1 Answers1

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One option is mixedsort

library(gtools)
mixedsort(x)
#[1] "1:A"   "2:A"   "201:A"

Or remove the non-numeric characters with gsub and order 

x[order(as.numeric(gsub("\\D+", "", x)))]
#[1] "1:A"   "2:A"   "201:A"
akrun
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