Sort dataframe by custom order

January 20, 2022

I have a dataframe that contains a rating column.

I would like to sort using a custom order, e.g.
AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B

However, default R sorting (using dplyr::arrange) results in
A AA AAA B BB BBB

data.frame(Rating=c('AAA','AA','A','B','BB','BBB'),
           Value1=c(1,2,3,4,5,6),
           Value2=c(2,3,4,5,3,2)) %>% 
           arrange(Rating)

I found many links referring to same problem but they are not related to dataframe eg
customize the sort function in R

How can I sort my data using a custom order?

>Solution :

If you know the complete list of possible ratings, the easiest way is to make it a factor with the values in order, e.g.

library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
data.frame(Rating=factor(c('A', 'AA','AAA','B','BB','BBB'),
                         levels=c('AAA','AA','A','BBB','BB','B')),
       Value1=c(1,2,3,4,5,6),
       Value2=c(2,3,4,5,3,2)) %>% 
       arrange(Rating)
#>   Rating Value1 Value2
#> 1    AAA      3      4
#> 2     AA      2      3
#> 3      A      1      2
#> 4    BBB      6      2
#> 5     BB      5      3
#> 6      B      4      5

^{Created on 2022-01-20 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}