Sort the column of dataframe in R

Sort the column of dataframe in R, sorting data is an essential operation that helps in organizing and analyzing data.

R provides various functions to sort data based on one or more columns. In this article, we will learn how to sort a column in a data frame using R’s built-in functions.

Let’s consider a simple dataset containing student scores for different subjects. Sample dataset for demonstration purposes only. You can replace this with your dataset.

Subject1 <- c(85, 92, 78, 90, 88)
Subject2 <- c(80, 95, 75, 92, 87)
Subject3 <- c(82, 91, 77, 93, 86)

Create a data frame from the above variables

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scores_data <- data.frame(Subject1, Subject2, Subject3)

Now, let’s see how we can sort the `Subject2` column in the `scores_data` data frame using R’s built-in functions.

# Sorting the scores_data data frame based on the second column (Subject2)

sorted_data <- scores_data[order(scores_data$Subject2), ]

Printing the sorted result

print(sorted_data)

Output:

   Subject1 Subject2 Subject3
3       78       75       77
1       85       80       82
5       88       87       86
4       90       92       93
2       92       95       91

In the above example, we first create a data frame called scores_data containing the scores for different subjects.

We then use the order() function to sort the Subject2 column in descending order.

The order() function returns the sorted indices, which we use to index the original data frame using the [] operator. Finally, we print the sorted result using the print() function.

Let’s see another example,

scores_data[order(-scores_data$Subject2), ]

    Subject1 Subject2 Subject3 
2       92       95       91 
4       90       92       93 
5       88       87       86 
1       85       80       82 
3       78       75       77

In conclusion, R provides various functions to sort data based on one or more columns. In this article, we learned how to sort a column in a data frame using R’s built-in functions.

This is a powerful feature of R that can be used to analyze and summarize data in various ways.

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