order() not doing its job - r

Question

This is driving me nuts. I am trying to sort a data frame by the first row in ascendinging order using the order function. Below a minimal example:
values <- c(11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1)
labels <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")
df <- data.frame(rbind(values,labels))
newdf <- df[,with(df,order(df[1,]))]
print(newdf)
I have also tried this with
newdf <- df[,order(df[1,])]
Here is the output I'm getting
X11 X2 X1 X10 X9 X8 X7 X6 X5 X4 X3
values 1 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
labels K B A J I H G F E D C
Which is clearly wrong! So what is going on here?

Answer 1

This is an odd way to structure your data in R, so it will cause headaches, but you can make it work. See #thelatemail 's comment re: columns vs rows. To make this work in your case, do:
values <- c(11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1)
labels <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")
df <- data.frame(rbind(values,labels), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
newdf <- df[order(as.numeric(df["values",]))]
newdf
# X11 X10 X9 X8 X7 X6 X5 X4 X3 X2 X1
# values 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
# labels K J I H G F E D C B A
Note, in particular, stringsAsFactors = FALSE when you create the data frame.
Remember, data.frames are lists, and each element of the list is a vector (possibly a list, but typically an atomic vector, especially if constructed in a standard way) of the same length. The individual elements of the data frame are columns. Rows are just the nested elements with the same index value. This makes it much easier to work with a data frame like this:
df <- data.frame(values = values, labels = labels)
df[order(df$values),]
# values labels
# 11 1 K
# 10 2 J
# 9 3 I
# 8 4 H
# 7 5 G
# 6 6 F
# 5 7 E
# 4 8 D
# 3 9 C
# 2 10 B
# 1 11 A
Here you don't have to worry at all about whether your numbers are going to be coerced to characters and/or factors when you line them up with another vector that's character. In this example, whether or not labels was a factor had no impact on values.