How do I remove a gap in date x axis?

Question

I have a time series data with a gap of year (e.g. 2006). I attempted to create a continuous lineplot ignoring this gap with scale_x_date. However, the function only removes the date labels on the x-axis and leaves a gap in the plot. Is there a way to remove the x-axis text and the gap in datapoints?

Data:

set.seed(123)
n <- 100
y <- sample.int(n, replace=TRUE)
t <- seq(from=as.Date("2001-01-01"), by="month", length.out=n)
dat <- data.frame(t, y)[!format(t, "%Y") %in% 2006, ]

Tried:

library(ggplot2)
my_break_fun <- function(x){
  br <- seq(from = min(x), to=max(x), by="2 month")
  br[!format(br, "%Y") %in% 2006]
}

dat |> 
  ggplot(aes(x=t, y=y)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_x_date(
    date_labels="%b-%Y",
    breaks=my_break_fun
  ) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1, vjust=1))

Answer 1

Facets would be one common way:

dat |> 
  dplyr::mutate(grp = t >= as.Date("2006-01-01")) |>
  ggplot(aes(x=t, y=y)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_x_date(
    date_labels="%b-%Y",
    breaks=my_break_fun
  ) +
  facet_grid(.~grp, scales = "free_x", space = "free_x") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1, vjust=1)) +
  theme(strip.background = element_blank(),
        strip.text = element_blank())