[R] Question about Sort

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Wen Huang wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am wondering if there is an option to control how R sort characters on 
> different machines.

Yes, and it is described on the help page for sort:

      The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating
      sequence of the locale in use: see 'Comparison'. The sort order
      for factors is the order of their levels (which is particularly
      appropriate for ordered factors).

and do study the cross-reference and its references.

Sorting on Mac OS X in UTF-8 locales seems broken (that is, the standard C 
functions compare in Unicode point order irrespective of language): we are 
working on a solution (the use of ICU. which can be compiled into R >= 
2.8.0).

>
> For example, on my Mac OS X
>
>> sort(c("H", "a"), decreasing = TRUE)
> [1] "a" "H"
>
> The same command on a Linux machine gives me
>> sort(c("H", "a"), decreasing = TRUE)
> [1] "H" "a"
>
> I don't know if there is an option to control the behavior of 'sort'.

Well, the posting guide did ask you to do your homework, including reading 
the help pages.

> Thanks,
> Wen


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595