Jeff, thanks a lot for your quick reply and the hint!
Meanwhile I found a solution that works - at least for my case ;) The code to get the job done is df[order(match(df$level,desiredOrder)),] So we seem in need of one order statement more. I found this solution doing it stepwise: ## sorting the levels of the level column in the data.frame df$level <- factor(df$level,levels=desiredOrder) ## sorting the data frame by the newly sorted level column df[order(df$level),] Maybe this solution is of a help for someone else as well? But honestly I still do not exactly understand why df[match(df$level,desiredOrder),] doesn't work... Cheers, Felix Am 29.12.11 10:58, schrieb Jeff Newmiller: > Your desiredOrder vector is a vector of strings. Convert it to numeric and it > should work. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Jeff Newmiller The ..... ..... Go Live... > DCN:<jdnew...@dcn.davis.ca.us> Basics: ##.#. ##.#. Live Go... > Live: OO#.. Dead: OO#.. Playing > Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries O.O#. #.O#. with > /Software/Embedded Controllers) .OO#. .OO#. rocks...1k > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity. > > drflxms <drfl...@googlemail.com> wrote: > >> Dear R colleagues, >> >> consider my data.frame named "df" with 3 columns - being level, >> prevalence and sensitivity - and 7 rows of data (see dump below). >> >> df <- >> structure(list(level = structure(1:7, .Label = c("0", "1", "10", >> "100", "1010", "11", "110"), class = "factor"), prevalence = >> structure(c(4L, >> 2L, 3L, 5L, 6L, 1L, 7L), .Label = c("0.488", "0.5", "0.754", >> "0.788", "0.803", "0.887", "0.905"), class = "factor"), sensitivity = >> structure(c(6L, >> 1L, 5L, 4L, 3L, 2L, 1L), .Label = c("0", "0.05", "0.091", "0.123", >> "0.327", "0.933"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("level", >> "prevalence", >> "sensitivity"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -7L)) >> >> I'd like to order df by a vector which is NOT contained in the >> data.frame. Let's call this vector desiredOrder (see dump below). >> >> desiredOrder <- c("0", "1", "10", "100", "11", "110", "1010") >> >> So after sorting, the order of the level column (df$level) should be in >> the order of the vector desiredOrder (as well a the associated data in >> the other columns). >> I know that this is not an easy task to achieve by order(...) as the >> order of desiredOrder isn't a natural one. But I would expect both of >> the following to work: >> >> ## using match >> df[match(df$level,desiredOrder),] >> >> ## using factor >> df[factor(df$level,levels=desiredOrder),] >> >> Unfortunately the result isn't what I expected: I get a data.frame with >> the level column in the order 0,1,10,100,110,1010,11 instead of the >> order in desiredOrder (0,1,10,100,11,110,1010). >> >> Does anybody see, what I am doing wrong? >> I'd appreciate any kind of help very much! >> Best regards, Felix >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide >> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.