How do you order a nominale variable. e.g month in R?

Question

This is a very basic problem but I do not find an answer. How can I order my variable \"Month\" so that when I make a bar plot January is first, then February...?

Th

Answer 1

@PhilipPham's answer is correct: this is equivalent but a little simpler:

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

since there is a built-in month.name variable in R that gives the English month names in order.

Answer 2

df$Month <- factor(df$Month,format(seq(as.Date("2013-01-01"),by="1 month",length=12),"%B"))

Then, plot again.

Answer 3

Adding to the answer from Ben (since I cannot add comments yet), you can do the following, assuming you have a dataframe with a Month column:

df$Month <- factor(df$Month,levels=month.name)
df = df[order(df$Month,decreasing=FALSE),]