Why does this work in R? I would think it would throw an error, because you cannot actually compare whether one string is greater than another.
"Test" > "Test"
[1] FALSE
1 Answers
You can compare strings in R. There is complete section provided in the help page (?Comparison) explaining how the comparison is performed.
Comparison of strings in character vectors is lexicographic within the strings using the collating sequence of the locale in use: see locales. The collating sequence of locales such as en_US is normally different from C (which should use ASCII) and can be surprising. Beware of making any assumptions about the collation order: e.g. in Estonian Z comes between S and T, and collation is not necessarily character-by-character – in Danish aa sorts as a single letter, after z. In Welsh ng may or may not be a single sorting unit: if it is it follows g. Some platforms may not respect the locale and always sort in numerical order of the bytes in an 8-bit locale, or in Unicode code-point order for a UTF-8 locale (and may not sort in the same order for the same language in different character sets). Collation of non-letters (spaces, punctuation signs, hyphens, fractions and so on) is even more problematic.
Character strings can be compared with different marked encodings (see Encoding): they are translated to UTF-8 before comparison.
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