Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to sort a dataframe by column(s) in R

I have a dataset that looks like this:

x       y     z
1.      1     0.2
1.1     1     1.5
1.2     1     3.
1.      2     8.1
1.1     2     1.0
1.2     2     0.6

What I would like is organise the dataset first as a function of x in increasing order then as a function of y such that

x       y      z 
1.      1      0.2
1.      2      8.1
1.1     1      1.5
1.1     2      1.
1.2     1      3.
1.2     2      0.6

I know that apply, mapply, tapply, etc functions reorganise datasets but I must admit that I don’t really understand the differences between them nor do I really understand how to apply which and when.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Answer 1

You can order your data using the order function. There is no need for any apply family function.

Assuming your data is in a data.frame called df:

df[order(df$x, df$y), ]
    x y   z
1 1.0 1 0.2
4 1.0 2 8.1
2 1.1 1 1.5
5 1.1 2 1.0
3 1.2 1 3.0
6 1.2 2 0.6

See ?order for more help.

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On a side note: reshaping in general refers to changing the shape of a data.frame, e.g. converting it from wide to tall format. This is not what is required here.