A Sort(a) Useful Trick

My blog is depressingly stagnant and I want to make more of an effort to just post things without putting too much thought into it.

For that reason, this post will be extremely brief, and will just show a useful trick that uses dput(), which was unfamiliar to me until I started looking for ways to contribute to the R tag on stackoverflow.

Here’s the sort(a)-scenario:

Let’s say you have a vector that’s built into your code that you’d like to sort. I’ve been stuck on an idea for a blog post about Saves the Day, and have a vector that contains body parts.

parts <- c("neck", "collarbone", "ankle", "thigh", "eyelid")

I like order in the world, and want to build this vector alphabetically, which will also make it easier to read as it’s presented in a blog post.

Instead of doing your A-B-C’s and manually rewriting the vector, just use dput()!

dput(sort(parts))

c("ankle", "collarbone", "eyelid", "neck", "thigh")

Easy!

Now we can just copy/paste and move on with our lives!

ordered_parts <- c("ankle", "collarbone", "eyelid", "neck", "thigh")