Sorting Numeric and Character Data

Use read.table(myfile, header = TRUE, as.is = TRUE) where as.is=TRUE
causes read.table not to convert character data to factors.

On 10/21/05, Thomas Hopper <tomhopper at comcast.net> wrote:

Hello,

I have what seems like an easy question to answer, but I'm struggling
with it.

I have a set of categorical data that I am reading in, looking
something like:

"category" "result"
"A" .234
"B" .123
"C" .564
"D" -.452
"E" .112
"F" -.106

I'd like to plot this twice on two separate dot charts, once with the
data ordered in ascending order by the "category" (character) column;
the other graph ordered in descending order by the "result" (numeric)
column.

My trouble is this: if I read this in as a data frame, I can order it
using something like data[order(d3$result),], but the "category"
column seems to get converted to an integer data type, which then
plots as numbers rather than letters on the dotchart(). If I read it
in as separate vector columns using scan() and copy-and-paste, I
don't know how to order both vectors together (such that "A" and .234
remain together).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Tom