sortcc

Purpose

Deprecated: Sorts a character matrix.

Format

y = sortcc(x, c)

Parameters:

• x (NxK matrix) – data

• c (scalar) – specifies the column of x to sort on

Returns:

y (NxK matrix) – equal to x and sorted on the column c.

Example

The use of character data is deprecated. You should use string arrays or dataframes.

// Create a matrix with character data
// in the first column
x = { "alpha",
      "beta",
      "alpha",
      "alpha" };

print $x;

alpha
beta
alpha
alpha

// sort the vector based on the characters
x_s = sortcc(x, 1);

print $x_s;

alpha
alpha
alpha
beta

Remarks

• This function is deprecated. New code should use sortc().

• These functions will sort the rows of a matrix with respect to a specified column. That is, they will sort the elements of a column and will arrange all rows of the matrix in the same order as the sorted column.

• sortcc() assumes that the column to sort on contains character data.

• The matrix may contain both character and numeric data, but the sort column must be all of one type.

• Missing values will sort as if their value is below \(-\infty\).

• The sort will be in ascending order.

• This function uses the Quicksort algorithm.

• If you need to obtain the matrix sorted in descending order, you can use:

  rev(sortcc(x, c))
  

See also

Functions rev(), sortind(), sortc(), unique()