I have a plot whose labels are factors of the form "1990-2012". They are too long and/or there are too many of them and they overlap.
I would like to print each label over two lines and break it after the hyphen, something like this:
For situations where breaking the labels into two parts would still not suffice, I would also like to know how to print only every other label.
A constraint I have is that the labelling should be done "in-place" without pre-processing of the data.frame and/or labels, though a custom function applied within the call to ggplot would be fine.
Here is the sacrosanct dataframe (cannot be altered):
df <- structure(list(Period = structure(1:13, .Label = c("0-1000",
"1000-1500", "1500-1700", "1700-1820", "1820-1913", "1913-1950",
"1950-1970", "1970-1990", "1990-2012", "2012-2030", "2030-2050",
"2050-2070", "2070-2100"), class = "factor"), value = c(0.000168759866884916,
0.000989913144738397, 0.00159894629454382, 0.0045594248070473,
0.00585564273031225, 0.00932876890888812, 0.0191066122563939,
0.0183146076484786, 0.0130117469870081, 0.00923670910453378,
0.00560791817163286, 0.00272731553972227, 0.00149387241891397
), variable = c("World", "World", "World", "World", "World",
"World", "World", "World", "World", "World", "World", "World",
"World")), .Names = c("Period", "value", "variable"), row.names = c(NA,
-13L), class = "data.frame")
Here is the ggplot:
library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(data = df, aes(x = Period, y = value, group = variable)) + geom_line() + theme_bw()
The following would work, if I had a space after the hyphen:
library(stringr)
p + scale_x_discrete(labels = function(x) str_wrap(x, width = 4))
[The two lines above were used to produce the second plot, after I had manually altered the dataframe to add a blank space after the date-separating hyphen, in other words, after I cheated]
The following approach to print fewer labels usually works, but fails here:
library(scales)
p + scale_x_discrete(breaks = pretty_breaks(n = 6))
Is this what you are looking for?
p + scale_x_discrete(
labels=function(x){
x2 <- sub("(\\d+)\\-(\\d+)",
"\\1\\-\n\\2",
x)
x2
})
Actually the intermediate x2
isn't even necessary, this
p + scale_x_discrete(
labels=function(x){
sub("(\\d+)\\-(\\d+)","\\1\\-\n\\2",x)
})
is a little more compact.
Edit: An even more concise solution, thanks to @jlhoward:
p + scale_x_discrete(
labels=function(x) sub("-","-\n",x,fixed=TRUE))
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