Create a factor with natural (human-friendly) ordering

Converts a character or numeric vector into a factor where the levels are ordered naturally (e.g., a1, a2, ..., a10 instead of lexicographically as a1, a10, a2, ...). This is useful for plotting or labeling grouped data where numeric substrings should follow numeric order.

Usage

factorNaturalOrder(x)

Arguments

x

A character or numeric vector to convert to a factor with natural order.

Value

A factor with levels sorted in natural (human-readable) order.

Examples

# Numeric vector
factorNaturalOrder(10:1)
#>  [1] 10 9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 
#> Levels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

# Character vector with embedded numbers
factorNaturalOrder(c("a11", "a12", "a1", "a2", "a"))
#> [1] a11 a12 a1  a2  a  
#> Levels: a a1 a2 a11 a12