Question

I have a data frame with 900,000 rows and 11 columns in R. The column names and types are as follows:

column name: date / mcode / mname / ycode / yname / yissue  / bsent   / breturn / tsent   / treturn / csales
type:        Date / Char  / Char  / Char  / Char  / Numeric / Numeric / Numeric / Numeric / Numeric / Numeric

I want to sort the data by those variables in the following order:

1. date
2. mcode
3. ycode
4. yissue

The order of levels are important here, i.e. they should be sorted by date first, and if there are identical dates, they should be sorted by mcode, so and so forth. How can I do that in R?

Answer 1

Perhaps something like this?

> df<- data.frame(a=rev(1:10), b=rep(c(2,1),5), c=rnorm(10))
> df
    a b           c
1  10 2 -0.85212079
2   9 1 -0.46199463
3   8 2 -1.52374565
4   7 1  0.28904717
5   6 2 -0.91609012
6   5 1  1.60448783
7   4 2  0.51249796
8   3 1 -1.35119089
9   2 2 -0.55497745
10  1 1 -0.05723538
> with(df, df[order(a, b, c), ])
    a b           c
10  1 1 -0.05723538
9   2 2 -0.55497745
8   3 1 -1.35119089
7   4 2  0.51249796
6   5 1  1.60448783
5   6 2 -0.91609012
4   7 1  0.28904717
3   8 2 -1.52374565
2   9 1 -0.46199463
1  10 2 -0.85212079

The “order” function can take several vectors as arguments.