dply: order columns alphabetically in R

Question

If I have a large DF (hundreds and hundreds) columns with different col_names randomly distributed alphabetically:

df.x <- data.frame(2:11, 1:10, rnorm(1         


        

Answer 1

If a specific column (or columns) has to be the first one (or last), but the rest is ordered, you can:

mtcars %>% tibble %>% 
  select("hp", sort(colnames(.)))

Answer 2

Why not just:

sort(colnames(df.x))

[1] "delta"  "ID"     "string"

Answer 3

An alternative way to do this in dplyr is:

iris %>% 
  select(sort(current_vars()))

current_vars() returns column names such that they're sortable, and select() will take the vector of column names.

Answer 4

Try this

df %>% select(noquote(order(colnames(df))))

or just

df[,order(colnames(df))]