String Sorting

This function sorts a character vector according to a locale-dependent lexicographic order.

Usage

stri_sort(str, decreasing = FALSE, na_last = NA, ..., opts_collator = NULL)

Arguments

str

a character vector

decreasing

a single logical value; should the sort order be nondecreasing (FALSE, default, i.e., weakly increasing) or nonincreasing (TRUE)?

na_last

a single logical value; controls the treatment of NAs in str. If TRUE, then missing values in str are put at the end; if FALSE, they are put at the beginning; if NA, then they are removed from the output

...

additional settings for opts_collator

opts_collator

a named list with ICU Collator's options, see stri_opts_collator, NULL for default collation options

Value

The result is a sorted version of str, i.e., a character vector.

Details

For more information on ICU's Collator and how to tune it up in stringi, refer to stri_opts_collator.

As usual in stringi, non-character inputs are coerced to strings, see an example below for a somewhat non-intuitive behavior of lexicographic sorting on numeric inputs.

This function uses a stable sort algorithm (STL's stable_sort), which performs up to \(N*log^2(N)\) element comparisons, where \(N\) is the length of str.

References

Collation - ICU User Guide, https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/collation/

See also

The official online manual of stringi at https://stringi.gagolewski.com/

Gagolewski M., stringi: Fast and portable character string processing in R, Journal of Statistical Software 103(2), 2022, 1-59, doi:10.18637/jss.v103.i02

Other locale_sensitive: %s<%(), about_locale, about_search_boundaries, about_search_coll, stri_compare(), stri_count_boundaries(), stri_duplicated(), stri_enc_detect2(), stri_extract_all_boundaries(), stri_locate_all_boundaries(), stri_opts_collator(), stri_order(), stri_rank(), stri_sort_key(), stri_split_boundaries(), stri_trans_tolower(), stri_unique(), stri_wrap()

Author

Marek Gagolewski and other contributors

Examples

stri_sort(c('hladny', 'chladny'), locale='pl_PL')
#> [1] "chladny" "hladny" 
stri_sort(c('hladny', 'chladny'), locale='sk_SK')
#> [1] "hladny"  "chladny"
stri_sort(sample(LETTERS))
#>  [1] "A" "B" "C" "D" "E" "F" "G" "H" "I" "J" "K" "L" "M" "N" "O" "P" "Q" "R" "S"
#> [20] "T" "U" "V" "W" "X" "Y" "Z"
stri_sort(c(1, 100, 2, 101, 11, 10))  # lexicographic order
#> [1] "1"   "10"  "100" "101" "11"  "2"  
stri_sort(c(1, 100, 2, 101, 11, 10), numeric=TRUE)  # OK for integers
#> [1] "1"   "2"   "10"  "11"  "100" "101"
stri_sort(c(0.25, 0.5, 1, -1, -2, -3), numeric=TRUE)  # incorrect
#> [1] "-1"   "-2"   "-3"   "0.5"  "0.25" "1"