Does collection () guarantee that the result is ordered by the grouping columns?

I noticed that aggregate()

it appears to be returning its result, ordered by the grouping columns. Is this a guarantee? Is it possible to rely on the surrounding logic?

A few examples:

set.seed(1); df <- data.frame(group=sample(letters[1:3],10,replace=T),value=1:10);
aggregate(value~group,df,sum);
##   group value
## 1     a    16
## 2     b    22
## 3     c    17

      

And with two groups (note that the second group is ordered first and then the first group breaks ties):

set.seed(1); df <- data.frame(group1=sample(letters[1:3],10,replace=T),group2=sample(letters[4:6],10,replace=T),value=1:10);
aggregate(value~group1+group2,df,sum);
##   group1 group2 value
## 1      a      d     1
## 2      b      d     2
## 3      b      e     9
## 4      c      e    10
## 5      a      f    15
## 6      b      f    11
## 7      c      f     7

      

Note. I ask because I just came up with an answer for Aggregating when merging two dataframes in R , which, at least in its current form at the time of writing, depends on aggregate()

returning its result ordered by the grouping column.

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Yes, as long as you understand that the natural order of factors depends on their whole keys. You can see this in the code:



y <- as.data.frame(by, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
...  # y becomes the "integerized" dataframe of index vectors
grp <- rank(do.call(paste, c(lapply(rev(y), ident), list(sep = "."))), 
        ties.method = "min")
y <- y[match(sort(unique(grp)), grp, 0L), , drop = FALSE]
...

      

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