Sorting Interior of a column in R - r

Question

I am trying to sort the interior of a column in R. For example I have this:
ID HoursAvailable
1 a,b,c,k,d
2 e,g,h
3 a,b,c,h,d
And I am trying to sort the numbers in the column internally like this
ID HoursAvailable
1 a,b,c,d,k
2 e,g,h,,
3 a,b,c,d,h
I have tried to use the separate function like this:
cdMCd<- cdMf %>% separate(HoursAvailable, c("a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j"))
But I cannot get it to sort correctly. For this example e in ID 2 would be sorted into the a column, but I need it sorted into the e column. I was planning to separate all the hours into separate columns, order, then recombine, but I cannot get them to separate correctly.

Answer 1

library(dplyr)
dt = read.table(text="
ID HoursAvailable
1 a,b,c,k,d
2 e,g,h
3 a,b,c,h,d
", header=T, stringsAsFactors=F)
SortString = function(x) {paste0(sort(unlist(strsplit(x, split=","))),collapse = ",")}
dt %>%
rowwise() %>%
mutate(Updated = SortString(HoursAvailable)) %>%
ungroup()
# # A tibble: 3 x 3
# ID HoursAvailable Updated
# <int> <chr> <chr>
# 1 1 a,b,c,k,d a,b,c,d,k
# 2 2 e,g,h e,g,h
# 3 3 a,b,c,h,d a,b,c,d,h

Answer 2

Here is what I will do:
First create a function that can sort a single one and then create a function that can apply such function to a vector of strings
library(stringr)
library(plyr)
split_and_sort <- function(x){
x_split <- sort(unlist(str_split(x, ",")))
return(paste(x_split, collapse = ","))
}
split_and_sort_column <- function(x){
laply(x, split_and_sort)
}
df$HoursAvailable <- split_and_sort_column(df$HoursAvailable)