Sorting of vectors can be done using the sort() function.
By default, it sorts in ascending order. To sort in descending order we can pass decreasing=TURE.
Note that sort is not in-place. This means that the original vector is not effected (sorted).
Only a sorted version of it is returned.
Example: Sort a Vector
> x
[1] 7 1 8 3 2 6 5 2 2 4
> # sort in ascending order
> sort(x)
[1] 1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
> # sort in descending order
> sort(x, decreasing=TRUE)
[1] 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 1
> # vector x remains unaffected
> x
[1] 7 1 8 3 2 6 5 2 2 4
Sometimes we would want the index of the sorted vector instead of the values. In such case we can use the function order().
> order(x)
[1] 2 5 8 9 4 10 7 6 1 3
> order(x, decreasing=TRUE)
[1] 3 1 6 7 10 4 5 8 9 2
> x[order(x)] # this will also sort x
[1] 1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8