Sort a given DataFrame by multiple column(s) in R

Sorting of data may be useful when working on a large data and data is un-arranged, so it is very helpful to sort data first before applying operations. In this article, we will learn how to sort given dataframes by multiple columns in R.

Approach:

• Create data frame
• Choose any more number of columns more than one
• Pass those columns as the parameter in the sorting functions.
• Display result

Data frame in use:

Method 1: Using order() and with()

with() is used to evaluate an expression that is related to some data 

Syntax:

with(data, expression)

order() is used to order the vectors given to it

Syntax:

order(vector(s))

Example:

R

data <- data.frame(x1 = 0:6,
                 x2 = c("A", "D", "A", "B", "d" , "b" , "E"),
                 x3 = c(2, 5, 1, 7, 20, 9 , 13))
data

data[with(data, order(x2, x3)), ]

Output: 

Method 2: Using arrange()

Syntax: Arrange()

Parameter:

• dataframe: The dataframe on which we want to sort.
• x1, x2:  These at the sorting columns.

This function is placed in the “dplyr” package so first, we have to install it explicitly.

R

# Load dplyr package
library("dplyr")

# Create example data
data <- data.frame(x1 = 0:6,
                 x2 = c("A", "D", "A", "B", "d" , "b" , "E"),
                 x3 = c(2, 5, 1, 7, 20, 9 , 13))
data
arrange(data, x2, x3)

Output: