How to sort day and month columns chronologically in R

[ritm]

I have day and month columns in a dataframe which are of character type.But i am unable to sort them chronologically.

Data Examples:-

Day Month
Fri Jul
Tue Aug
Sat Apr
Tue May
Mon Jul
Fri Sep

[siddharthprabhu]

Would you mind explaining what the objective of sorting the data is? Do you want the days or months to appear in chronological order in a plot perhaps?

[ritm]

I want both days and months to be chronologically displayed in various things such as aggregate functions and plots as well.

[MikeKSmith]

To handle the month information you could do something like:

Month <- factor(Month, levels = month.abb)

This will convert the Month column to a sorted factor. month.abb is a built in vector of abbreviated month names. For full month names, use month.name.

You could use a similar approach on the Day names, sorting according to your preference i.e. week starting on Sunday or Monday. I don't know of a built in vector of day name, but it's probably better to create your own ordering.