plot numeric vector with names as x ticks

Question

I have a numeric vector and wish to plot each value on y-axis by their name on the x-axis.

Example:

quantity <- c(3,5,2)
names(quantity) <- c("apples","bananas", "pears")
plot(quantity)

Each value is plotted with it's index number along the x-axis ie. 1,2,3. How can I get it to show ("apples","bananas", "pears")?

Answer 1

You can use function axis() to add labels. Argument xaxt="n" inside plot() will make plot without x axis labels (numbers).

plot(quantity,xaxt="n")
axis(1,at=1:3,labels=names(quantity))

Answer 2

Do you look for barplot?

barplot(quantity)

Answer 3

And another option using lattice:

library(lattice)
barchart(quantity)