r - Do not ignore case in sorting character strings

Question

Is there a builtin functionality in R to sort character vectors taking case into account? sort and order ignore the case:

tv <- c("a", "A", "ab", "B")
sort(tv)
## [1] "a"  "A"  "ab" "B" 

This is my solution so far:

CAPS <- grep("^[A-Z]", tv)
c(sort(tv[CAPS]), sort(tv[-CAPS]))
## [1] "A"  "B"  "a"  "ab"

Answer 1

Following post about Auto-completion in Notepad++ you could change local settings:

Sys.setlocale(, "C")
sort(tv)
# [1] "A"  "B"  "a"  "ab"

---

EDIT. I read help pages to Sys.setlocale and it seems that changing LC_COLLATE is sufficient: Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")

To temporally change collate for sorting you could use withr package:

withr::with_collate("C", sort(tv))

or use stringr package (as in @dracodoc comment):

stringr::str_sort(tv, locale="C")

I think this is the best way to do it.