Try (df1[order(-df1[,2]),]) Adding the minus within the [ leaves out the column (in this case column 2). See ?"[".
HTH. Nick Sabbe -- ping: nick.sa...@ugent.be link: http://biomath.ugent.be wink: A1.056, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Gent ring: 09/264.59.36 -- Do Not Disapprove -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of John Kane Sent: donderdag 12 mei 2011 14:33 To: R R-help Subject: [R] Simple order() data frame question. Clearly, I don't understand what order() is doing and as ususl the help for order seems to only confuse me more. For some reason I just don't follow the examples there. I must be missing something about the data frame sort there but what? I originally wanted to reverse-order my data frame df1 (see below) by aa (a factor) but since this was not working I decided to simplify and order by bb to see what was haqppening!! I'm obviously doing something stupid but what? (df1 <- data.frame(aa=letters[1:10], bb=rnorm(10))) # Order in acending order by bb (df1[order(df1[,2]),] ) # seems to work fine # Order in decending order by bb. (df1[order(df1[,-2]),]) # does not seem to work =============================================================== sessionInfo() R version 2.13.0 (2011-04-13) Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit) locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=English_Canada.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_Canada.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_Canada.1252 [4] LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=English_Canada.1252 attached base packages: [1] grid grDevices datasets splines graphics stats tcltk utils methods base other attached packages: [1] ggplot2_0.8.9 proto_0.3-9.2 reshape_0.8.4 plyr_1.5.2 svSocket_0.9-51 TinnR_1.0.3 R2HTML_2.2 [8] Hmisc_3.8-3 survival_2.36-9 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] cluster_1.13.3 lattice_0.19-26 svMisc_0.9-61 tools_2.13.0 > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.