[R] Sorting Numeric and Character Data

[Thomas Hopper]

Thank you; that did it!

Regards,

Tom

On Oct 21, 2005, at 10:46 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

> Use read.table(myfile, header = TRUE, as.is = TRUE) where as.is=TRUE
> causes read.table not to convert character data to factors.
>
> On 10/21/05, Thomas Hopper <tomhopper at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have what seems like an easy question to answer, but I'm struggling
>> with it.
>>
>> I have a set of categorical data that I am reading in, looking
>> something like:
>>
>> "category" "result"
>> "A" .234
>> "B" .123
>> "C" .564
>> "D" -.452
>> "E" .112
>> "F" -.106
>>
>> I'd like to plot this twice on two separate dot charts, once with the
>> data ordered in ascending order by the "category" (character) column;
>> the other graph ordered in descending order by the "result" (numeric)
>> column.
>>
>> My trouble is this: if I read this in as a data frame, I can order it
>> using something like data[order(d3$result),], but the "category"
>> column seems to get converted to an integer data type, which then
>> plots as numbers rather than letters on the dotchart(). If I read it
>> in as separate vector columns using scan() and copy-and-paste, I
>> don't know how to order both vectors together (such that "A" and .234
>> remain together).
>>
>> Any help would be much appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Tom
>>
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>

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