How to sort a character vector that has numbers in it

Question

I have a data frame that I am trying to sort by character's that contain numbers in it.

The column looks like this (Team1, Team2, Team3, Team4, Team5,....Team10) and when I sort it will sort it as (Team1, Team10, Team2 ....). I am using this with hundreds of different terms in that column so is there a way that you can sort the column so it sees the Team2 as an earlier value than Team3?

Alternatively, you could extract the team number and use that to sort (e. g. `df %>% mutate(team_no = str_extract(col1, "\\d+")) %>% arrange(team_no)`) — Owe Jessen, May 27 '20 at 19:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 27 '20 at 19:42

1

Using base R:

set.seed(357)
xy <- paste("Team", sample(1:10), sep = "")

Sorting "the dumb way".

xy.sort <- sort(xy)
xy.sort

[1] "Team1"  "Team10" "Team2"  "Team3"  "Team4"  "Team5"  "Team6"  "Team7"  "Team8"  "Team9"

If you extract the number and convert them to numeric, you can use them to order the original data.frame.

get.nums <- gsub("^Team(\\d+)$", replacement = "\\1", x = xy)
xy[order(as.numeric(get.nums))]

[1] "Team1"  "Team2"  "Team3"  "Team4"  "Team5"  "Team6"  "Team7"  "Team8"  "Team9"  "Team10"

answered May 27 '20 at 19:42

Roman Luštrik

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Definitely works for this example, but that depends on uniformity in the "alpha" part of the input vector... Hello, BTW :-) – A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1 May 27 '20 at 23:52
@A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1 the entire world is edge case! :) Hello. – Roman Luštrik May 29 '20 at 09:20

How to sort a character vector that has numbers in it

1 Answers1