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How to sort a dataframe by column(s) in R

Submitted by Christopher DuBois on August 18, 2009

I want to sort a data.frame by multiple columns in R. For example, with the data.frame below I would like to sort by column z (descending) then by column b (ascending): 

dd <- data.frame(b = factor(c("Hi", "Med", "Hi", "Low"), 
      levels = c("Low", "Med", "Hi"), ordered = TRUE),
      x = c("A", "D", "A", "C"), y = c(8, 3, 9, 9),
      z = c(1, 1, 1, 2))
dd
    b x y z
1  Hi A 8 1
2 Med D 3 1
3  Hi A 9 1
4 Low C 9 2