Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to sort letters in a string in R?

I have a dataframe where a variable is a character string. Is there a way to create another variable having the same elements as x, but each sorted in ascending or descending order as below:

x_old: (trad, jfwd, qerf…)

x_new: (adrt, dfjw, efqr…)

Answer 1

There must be an easier way:

x <- c("trad", "jfwd", "qerf")
unname(sapply(x, function(i)paste(sort(unlist(strsplit(i, ""))), collapse="")))
[1] "adrt" "dfjw" "efqr"