CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rsortingstring-operations
peachy
peachy

Reputation: 15

r - How to sort words in a string?

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.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2137

Answers (2)

Mako212
Mako212

Reputation: 7312

Try this:

input$new <- sapply(lapply(strsplit(input$str, " "), sort),paste,collapse=" ")

Upvotes: 2

d.b
d.b

Reputation: 32548

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

Upvotes: 3

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