Let's say I have a dataframe of strings.
Each string is a series of numbers; there could be any quantity of numbers in each string.
How can I re-sort those numbers within the string?
input <- data.frame(id = c(1,2,3),str = c('400','201 17','30 1 5'),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
desired_out <- data.frame(id = c(1,2,3),str = c('400','17 201','1 5 30'),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
If it helps, I'm not picky numerical vs. character sorting - i.e. I don't care if '201 21 11' gets sorted to '11 21 201' or '11 201 21', as long as it gets sorted consistently.
Split the elements of input$str, convert them to numeric, sort them, and paste them back together
input <- data.frame(id = c(1,2,3),str = c('400','201 17','30 1 5'),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
input$new_str = sapply(input$str, function(x)
paste(sort(as.numeric(unlist(strsplit(x, " ")))), collapse = " "))
input
# id str new_str
#1 1 400 400
#2 2 201 17 17 201
#3 3 30 1 5 1 5 30