R help - Nov 2003 - comparing characters

Hi all,
I?m having some trouble when trying to compare character values (to 
check if they are alphabetically ordered). Is it possible to do it in 
any way?
Thanks for your help. Cheers,

        Aurora

What sort of trouble are you having?  I just got the following from R 
1.8.0: 

 > "a"<"b"
[1] TRUE
 > "a">"b"
[1] FALSE
 > "ab"<"a"
[1] FALSE
 > "ab">"a"
[1] TRUE

hope this helps.  spencer graves

Aurora Torrente wrote:
> Hi all,
> I?m having some trouble when trying to compare character values (to 
> check if they are alphabetically ordered). Is it possible to do it in 
> any way?
> Thanks for your help. Cheers,
>
>        Aurora
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help

You could do something like that: 
> x <- sample(LETTERS, 10)
> x
 [1] "K" "N" "C" "F" "R"
"E" "L" "J" "S"
"Q"
> all.equal(order(x), 1:length(x))
[1] "Mean relative  difference: 0.5090909"

When x is a numeric vector, I usually use
> any(diff(x) < 0)
although I don't know whether it's more efficient.

HTH,
Giovanni
> Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 16:46:34 +0000
> From: Aurora Torrente <aurora at ebi.ac.uk>
> Sender: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Organization: EBI
> Precedence: list
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB;	rv:0.9.4)
>  Gecko/20011128 Netscape6/6.2.1
> 
> Hi all,
> I?m having some trouble when trying to compare character values (to 
> check if they are alphabetically ordered). Is it possible to do it in 
> any way?
> Thanks for your help. Cheers,
> 
>         Aurora
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> 
> 

-- 

 __________________________________________________
[                                                  ]
[ Giovanni Petris                 GPetris at uark.edu ]
[ Department of Mathematical Sciences              ]
[ University of Arkansas - Fayetteville, AR 72701  ]
[ Ph: (479) 575-6324, 575-8630 (fax)               ]
[ http://definetti.uark.edu/~gpetris/              ]
[__________________________________________________]

Aurora Torrente wrote:
> Hi all,
> I?m having some trouble when trying to compare character values (to 
> check if they are alphabetically ordered). Is it possible to do it in 
> any way?
> Thanks for your help. Cheers,
"a" < "b" should work.
If that's not your question, you have to be more specific.

Uwe Ligges

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 10:46, Aurora Torrente wrote:
> Hi all,
> I?m having some trouble when trying to compare character values (to 
> check if they are alphabetically ordered). Is it possible to do it in 
> any way?
> Thanks for your help. Cheers,
> 
>         Aurora

Depending upon what it is you are comparing, you may find differences
from what you expect due to to your 'locale'.

See ?Comparison for more information.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz

That?s what I needed. Thanks!

Spencer Graves wrote:
> What sort of trouble are you having?  I just got the following from R 
> 1.8.0:
> > "a"<"b"
> [1] TRUE
> > "a">"b"
> [1] FALSE
> > "ab"<"a"
> [1] FALSE
> > "ab">"a"
> [1] TRUE
>
> hope this helps.  spencer graves
>
>