Change text order in R

Question

I have a character column in a data frame that contains two or more phrases, each of these phrases is separated by a &&. I would like R to not differentiate between phrase1 && phrase2 and phrase2 && phrase1. Any ideas how I could go about this?

Example of the output I'd like...

text = c("a && b", "c && d", "e && f", "d && c", "g && h", "f && e")
desired_result = c("a && b", "c && d", "e && f", "c && d", "g && h", "e && f")
df = data.frame(text, desired_result )

so do you want a third column which states TRUE if both e-f and f-e are same ? what is your expected output? — joel.wilson, Dec 06 '16 at 09:34
the output I'd like is the result column in the data frame I posted above — NMaguire, Dec 06 '16 at 09:36

Miff · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-06T09:50:14.650

3

sapply(strsplit(text, " && "), function(x) paste(sort(x), collapse=" && "))

does what you're after. It works by splitting the string before/after the && part, sorting and then pasting back together.

edited Dec 06 '16 at 09:50

answered Dec 06 '16 at 09:41

Miff

7,486
20
20

Change text order in R

1 Answers1