R – ggplot2 issues with date as character for x-axis

by

  1. "1/6/2019" is not a date, it is a string. ggplot2 (and most other things) should never infer that you want it dealt with as a date. What it does “know” is that it is a string, and since it is not a factor, it orders things lexicographically (not year-first). Note that this matches your observation that it sorts first by month, then day, since those are the first few characters in the strings.

  2. Once we make the Week column a proper Date class, if you want to keep the presentation in the "%m/%d/%Y" format, you need to add scale_x_date.

Week <- c("1/6/2019", "1/26/2020", "6/7/2020")
Coronavirus <- c(0, 16, 67)
Grubhub <- c(65, 23, 59)
UberEats <- c(52, 80, 68)
Doordash <- c(27, 35, 50)

my.data <- data.frame(Week, Coronavirus, Grubhub, UberEats, Doordash)
my.data$Week <- as.Date(my.data$Week, format = "%m/%d/%Y")
my.data

test.output <- ggplot(data = my.data, aes(x = Week, group = 1)) +
  geom_line(aes(y = Coronavirus), color = "red") +
  geom_line(aes(y = Grubhub), color = "darkgreen") +
  geom_line(aes(y = UberEats), color = "blue") +
  geom_line(aes(y = Doordash), color = "purple") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90)) +
  labs(title = "Weekly Google Search Term Interest by Category", y = "Search Term Interest", x = "Week [2020]") 
test.output

ggplot2 with default date labels

If you prefer "%m/%d/%Y", then

test.output + scale_x_date(date_labels = "%m/%d/%Y")

ggplot2 with m/d/Y labels

More Related Contents:

  1. ggplot2 line chart gives “geom_path: Each group consist of only one observation. Do you need to adjust the group aesthetic?”
  2. Plot multiple columns on the same graph in R [duplicate]
  3. Remove space between plotted data and the axes
  4. How to use an image as a point in ggplot?
  5. Construct a manual legend for a complicated plot
  6. How to put labels over geom_bar in R with ggplot2
  7. Wrap long axis labels via labeller=label_wrap in ggplot2
  8. Plot multiple lines in one graph [duplicate]
  9. How do I change the formatting of numbers on an axis with ggplot? [duplicate]
  10. Explain ggplot2 warning: “Removed k rows containing missing values”
  11. Place a border around points
  12. draw the sum value above the stacked bar in ggplot2
  13. double dots in a ggplot
  14. Removing the border of legend symbol
  15. How to deal with spaces in column names?
  16. ggplot2: Adjust the symbol size in legends
  17. Different breaks per facet in ggplot2 histogram
  18. How to align the bars of a histogram with the x axis?
  19. Fitting with ggplot2, geom_smooth and nls
  20. How to fill with different colors between two lines? (originally: fill geom_polygon with different colors above and below y = 0 (or any other value)?)
  21. How to add multiple captions in ggplot2 outside of the main graph area
  22. Change the default colour palette in ggplot
  23. ggplot geom_point() with colors based on specific, discrete values
  24. Combining `expression()` with `\n`
  25. How to label a barplot bar with positive and negative bars with ggplot2
  26. GGplot custom scale transformation with custom ticks
  27. Specify height and width of ggplot graph in Rmarkdown knitr output
  28. The perils of aligning plots in ggplot
  29. How do I loop through column names and make a ggplot scatteplot for each one
  30. How to use superscript in axis labels with ggplot2

Leave a Comment