R help - Oct 1999 - Q: sort a matrix by picking up columns?

Hi,

I am wondering how to write a function which sorts a matrix by giving a
vector of column numbers.

Suppose we have a matrix (or data frame) "Mat" and I want to obtain
order(Mat[,1], Mat[,3], Mat[,6,], Mat[,8], Mat[,10], Mat[,13])
in order to sort the matrix by those columns. Is there a way to write a
function so that I can give a vector of the column numbers 
c(1,3,6,8,10,13) and do the sorting? Here we know that we cannot just
write order(Mat[,c(1,3,6,8,10,13)]), which would give a wrong answer.

Thanks for any input.

Jessie

Yuyun Jessie Yang
Dissertator, Department of Statistics
University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Thank Douglas Bates, Jan Schelling, Renaud Lancelot for teaching me the
do.call() function, and thank John Bjornar Bremnes for teaching me the
format() function. I would like to also thank the others who contribute
their inputs. Here is a brief summary of replies so far.

A function shown below will do what I need:
(This is copied from Renaud Lancelot's reply to r-help list.)
> SortMat <- function(Mat, Sort)
{
        m <- do.call("order", as.data.frame(Mat[, Sort]))
        Mat[m,  ]
}

Another trick by John Bjornar Bremnes also works on my small elemantary
example. It helped me learn another function format(). I haven't tried it
on my bigger data sets yet though:

a <- c(1,3,6,8,10,13)
Mat[ order( apply(format(Mat[,a]), 1, paste, collapse="") ), ]



Jessie

==================== the original question ========================
On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Yuyun Jessie Yang wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am wondering how to write a function which sorts a matrix by giving a
> vector of column numbers.
> 
> Suppose we have a matrix (or data frame) "Mat" and I want to
obtain
> order(Mat[,1], Mat[,3], Mat[,6,], Mat[,8], Mat[,10], Mat[,13])
> in order to sort the matrix by those columns. Is there a way to write a
> function so that I can give a vector of the column numbers 
> c(1,3,6,8,10,13) and do the sorting? Here we know that we cannot just
> write order(Mat[,c(1,3,6,8,10,13)]), which would give a wrong answer.
> 
> Thanks for any input.
> 
> Jessie
> 
> Yuyun Jessie Yang
> Dissertator, Department of Statistics
> University of Wisconsin-Madison
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r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
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(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
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