Sorting numeric DataTable fields with decimal separator

[Victor Kryukov]

Hello,

I've encountered a very puzzling behavior when using DataTables (the javascript ones).

I have a data frame with numeric data where numeric columns are converted to characters with decimal separator, using format(round(x, 0), big.mark = ","). The resulting data frame is than feed to renderDataTable.

I'm receiving different results when sorting such columns in browser: on Mac and Windows, they are sorted properly (in increasing numerical orders), while on Linux (CentOs 5.9), they are sorted alphabetically . I made sure that R environments are exactly the same - same R version, same shiny library version (0.8.0), etc. 

We cannot use DataTable's sorting plugins[1] at the moment[2], it seems. renderDataTable has somewhat cryptic message in it's documentation string - "Paging, searching, filtering, and sorting can be done on the R side using Shiny as the server infrastructure". I'm not sure what exactly should I do to sort my numeric columns properly on the server side?

Any help on how to sort numeric columns with decimal separators properly would be much appreciated!

Victor

[1] http://datatables.net/plug-ins/sorting

[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/shiny-discuss/QHYDqEK217U/do4CfRN0uEsJ

[Victor Kryukov]

So looks like nobody knows... For now, I just switched back to displaying numbers without a decimal separation. Looking forward for a improved DataTable support in the future versions of shiny!

[Yihui Xie]

Unfortunately, that is expected -- sorting is locale dependent for
character strings. Characters are unlike numbers, which have definite
orders. See ?sort in R.

Regards,
Yihui