I have a data frame which looks like this :
a = c("1A","10A","11A","2B","2C","22C","3A","3B")
b= c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
ab = data.frame(a,b)
and I want to sort it according to the column a. I tried the mixed order
library(gtools)
ab[mixedorder(ab$a),]
but I don' t get the result I want (1A,2B,2C,3A,3B..). How can I fix this?
We need to convert to character class (as the 'a' column is factor based on the default option in data.frame call i.e. stringsAsFactors=TRUE)
ab[mixedorder(as.character(ab$a)),]
# a b
#1 1A 1
#4 2B 4
#5 2C 5
#7 3A 7
#8 3B 8
#2 10A 2
#3 11A 3
#6 22C 6
Additional options are also explained in here