r - How to sort letters in a string?

Question

Let's say I have a string s = "bcabca".

What is the simplest way to get "aabbcc" out of it, i.e., sort the letters in s?

Answer 1

Maybe not the most simple answer, but this will work:

paste(sort(unlist(strsplit(s, ""))), collapse = "")

Or modify the strReverse function that is defined in the help page for ?strsplit to suit our needs. We'll call it strSort:

strSort <- function(x)
        sapply(lapply(strsplit(x, NULL), sort), paste, collapse="")