R base function to sort vector of strings based on length

r sorting string-length
Marius picture Marius · Mar 11, 2014 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

I was wondering if there is an already made function in R base package that can sort a vector of strings taking into consideration the length of each element and then of course the lexicographical order. For instance after a sort call on some vector holding age groups you would have:

v <- c("00-04", "05-09", "10-14", "100-104", "105-109", "110-114", "15-19", "20-24"..etc)

whereas I would like to have:

v <- c("00-04", "05-09", "10-14", "15-19", "20-24"..etc.. "100-104", "105-109", "110-114")

Answer

Victorp picture Victorp · Mar 11, 2014

Simply with order : 

v[order(nchar(v), v)]

## [1] "00-04"   "05-09"   "10-14"   "15-19"   "20-24"   "100-104" "105-109" "110-114"

Is that what you're looking for?

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