Reorder a subset of an R data.frame modifying the row names as well

Question

Given a data.frame:

foo <- data.frame(ID=1:10, x=1:10)
rownames(foo) <- LETTERS[1:10]

I would like to reorder a subset of rows, defined by their row names. However, I would like to swap the row names of foo as well. I can do

sel <- c("D", "H") # rows to reorder
foo[sel,] <- foo[rev(sel),]
sel.wh <- match(sel, rownames(foo))
rownames(foo)[sel.wh] <- rownames(foo)[rev(sel.wh)]

but that is long and complicated. Is there a simpler way?

Answer 1

We can replace the sel values in rownames with the reverse of sel.

x <- rownames(foo)
foo[replace(x, x %in% sel, rev(sel)), ]

#  ID  x
#A  1  1
#B  2  2
#C  3  3
#H  8  8
#E  5  5
#F  6  6
#G  7  7
#D  4  4
#I  9  9
#J 10 10