How to sort a dataframe by column(s)?

[duttashi]

I want to sort a data.frame by multiple columns. For example, with the data.frame below I would like to sort by column z (descending) then by column b (ascending):

dd <- data.frame(b = factor(c("Hi", "Med", "Hi", "Low"), 
      levels = c("Low", "Med", "Hi"), ordered = TRUE),
      x = c("A", "D", "A", "C"), y = c(8, 3, 9, 9),
      z = c(1, 1, 1, 2))
dd
    b x y z
1  Hi A 8 1
2 Med D 3 1
3  Hi A 9 1
4 Low C 9 2

[duttashi]

Your choices

• order from base
• arrange from dplyr
• setorder and setorderv from data.table
• arrange from plyr
• sort from taRifx
• orderBy from doBy
• sortData from Deducer

Alternative Approach # 1 You can use the order() function directly without resorting to add-on tools -- see this simpler answer which uses a trick right from the top of the example(order) code:

> dd[with(dd, order(-z, b)), ]
    b x y z
4 Low C 9 2
2 Med D 3 1
1  Hi A 8 1
3  Hi A 9 1

Alternative Approach # 2

To do this by column index. The answer is to simply pass the desired sorting column(s) to the order()function:

> dd[ order(-dd[,4], dd[,1]), ]
    b x y z
4 Low C 9 2
2 Med D 3 1
1  Hi A 8 1
3  Hi A 9 1

Alternative Approach # 3

You can also use the arrange() function from plyr

library(plyr)
arrange(dd,desc(z),b)

Alternative Approach # 4

The dplyr way;

library(dplyr)
# sort mtcars by mpg, ascending... use desc(mpg) for descending
arrange(mtcars, mpg)
# sort mtcars first by mpg, then by cyl, then by wt)
arrange(mtcars , mpg, cyl, wt)

In reference to the question, arrange() can be used as given:

arrange(dd, desc(z),  b)

    b x y z
1 Low C 9 2
2 Med D 3 1
3  Hi A 8 1
4  Hi A 9 1