How to change the order of words with alphabetic order

Question

I got a dataset with a list of keywords (1 keyword / row).

1. I m looking for a way to create a new column (ALPHABETICAL) based on the KEYWORD column. The value o

Answer 1

Iterate over rows to split by " "(strsplit), sort and collapse back:

# Generate data
df <- data.frame(KEYWORD = c(paste(sample(letters, 3), collapse = " "), 
                             paste(sample(letters, 3), collapse = " ")))
#  KEYWORD
#   z e s
#   d a u

df$ALPHABETICAL  <- apply(df, 1, function(x) paste(sort(unlist(strsplit(x, " "))),
                                                   collapse = " "))
#  KEYWORD ALPHABETICAL
#   z e s        e s z
#   d a u        a d u

Answer 2

df$ALPHABETICAL <- sapply(strsplit(df$KEYWORD," "),function(x) paste(sort(x),collapse=" "))

df
#              KEYWORD       ALPHABETICAL
# 1         house blue         blue house
# 2         blue house         blue house
# 3      my blue house      blue house my
# 4 this house is blue blue house is this
# 5         sky orange         orange sky
# 6         orange sky         orange sky
# 7     the orange sky     orange sky the

data

df <- data.frame(KEYWORD = c(
  'house blue',
  'blue house',
  'my blue house',
  'this house is blue',
  'sky orange',
  'orange sky',
  'the orange sky'),stringsAsFactors = FALSE)  

Answer 3

One solution with dplyr + stringr

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
KEYWORDS  <- c('house blue','blue house','my blue house','this house is blue','sky orange','orange sky','the orange sky')

ALPHABETICAL <- KEYWORDS %>% str_split(., ' ') %>% lapply(., 'sort') %>%  lapply(., 'paste', collapse=' ') %>% unlist(.)

The last line uses str_split() to split the KEYWORDS into a list of vectors; sort is then applied to each list element; the vectors are concatenated using paste, and finally the list is broken into a vector.

The result is

> cbind(KEYWORDS, ALPHABETICAL)
     KEYWORDS             ALPHABETICAL        
[1,] "house blue"         "blue house"        
[2,] "blue house"         "blue house"        
[3,] "my blue house"      "blue house my"     
[4,] "this house is blue" "blue house is this"
[5,] "sky orange"         "orange sky"        
[6,] "orange sky"         "orange sky"        
[7,] "the orange sky"     "orange sky the"