Option to return as an ordered factor?

[DarwinAwardWinner]

Converting to ordinal is nice, but if I want to use the result to e.g. label a plot, I need to convert the resulting character vector into an ordered factor, which is not trivial if things are not already in order. It would be nice if there was an option to return an ordered factor, or perhaps it could just return a character vector with an extra class attached with S3 methods for converting to factor/ordered that do the right thing.

[DarwinAwardWinner]

A simple implementation:

to_ordered_ordinal <- function(x) {
    x_levels <- toOrdinal(seq(from = 1, to = max(x)))
    ordered(toOrdinal(x), levels = x_levels)
}

Example usage:

> to_ordered_ordinal(sample(1:10))
 [1] 4th  6th  8th  10th 9th  1st  2nd  5th  7th  3rd
Levels: 1st < 2nd < 3rd < 4th < 5th < 6th < 7th < 8th < 9th < 10th