Sorting months in R

Question

I want to sort month names. When I use the strptime function it returns an error as the attribute values only contains month names. When I use the sort function, the months are sorted alphabetically.

Answer 1

You could always convert your data to a factor. For example, suppose we have

x = c("January", "February", "March", "January")  

then to convert to a factor, we have:

x_fac = factor(x, levels = month.name)

which on sorting gives:

R> sort(x_fac)
[1] January  January  February March   
12 Levels: January February March April May June July August ... December