R help - Mar 2010 - How can I sort a character type vector?

Dear All,

I want to sort a character type vector.
the vector is
[1] 4  5  6  8  9  11 Y  1  13 15 16 20 X  2  3  10 14 19 XY 7  12 18 17 22
[25] 21

and I want to sort  1-22 X Y XY or 1-22 X XY Y.
How can I do that?

Thanks,

Soyeon -
    It sounds like you want a combination of a numerical
sort and a lexigraphical sort.  I think they need to 
be done separately, and then joined back together:
> myvec = scan(,what='')
1: 4  5  6  8  9  11 Y  1  13 15 16 20 X  2  3  10 14 19 XY 7  12 18 17 22 21
26: 
Read 25 items
> myvecn = as.numeric(myvec)
Warning message:
NAs introduced by coercion 
> c(sort(myvecn),sort(myvec[is.na(myvecn)]))
  [1] "1"  "2"  "3"  "4"  "5" 
"6"  "7"  "8"  "9"  "10"
"11" "12" "13" "14" "15"
[16] "16" "17" "18" "19" "20"
"21" "22" "X"  "XY" "Y"

 					- Phil Spector
 					 Statistical Computing Facility
 					 Department of Statistics
 					 UC Berkeley
 					 spector at stat.berkeley.edu



On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Soyeon Kim wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I want to sort a character type vector.
> the vector is
> [1] 4  5  6  8  9  11 Y  1  13 15 16 20 X  2  3  10 14 19 XY 7  12 18 17 22
> [25] 21
>
> and I want to sort  1-22 X Y XY or 1-22 X XY Y.
> How can I do that?
>
> Thanks,
>
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