r - Order dataframe for given columns

Question

I have data similar to these:

data <- data.frame(x1=rexp(10,2),y1=rnorm(10,1),x2=rexp(10,2),y2=rnorm(10,1),x3=rexp(10,2),y3=rnorm(10,1),x4=rexp(10,2),y4=rnorm(10,1))

I would like to order all y1,y2... variables in increasing order.

I have tried this among others:

data[with(data,order(y1,y2,y3,y4,decreasing=FALSE)), ]

There is number of SO contribution for example here about order, yet I cannot make it work.

Answer 1

You could try

indx <- do.call(order, c(data[grep('^y', names(data))], decreasing=TRUE))
data[indx,] 

By default, the option is decreasing=FALSE. If that is what you wanted, just do

indx <- do.call(order, data[grep('^y', names(data))])