CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstringggplot2label
user2245731
user2245731

Reputation: 549

How can I shorten x-axis label text in ggplot?

I'm making a plot in ggplot where the x-axis labels contain the names of different proteins, and I'm having trouble because some of these names are too long and the labels becomes so big that it is hard to see the plot.

Instead of "printing" a bigger graph, there is any way to reduce the number of characters in the x-axis labels?

Here's an example that shows my problem:

library(ggplot2)
dat <- mtcars
# Make the x-axis labels very long for this example
dat$car <- paste0(rownames(mtcars),rownames(mtcars),rownames(mtcars),rownames(mtcars))

ggplot(dat, aes (x=car,y=hp)) +
    geom_bar(stat ="identity", fill="#009E73",colour="black") +
    theme_bw() +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1))

enter image description here

I would like to convert the labels from something like this:

Thisisaveryveryveryloooooongprotein

To this

Thisisavery[...]

So that my plot can be consistently visible

Upvotes: 8

Views: 16348

Answers (2)

divibisan
divibisan

Reputation: 12165

Since abbreviate works by removing spaces and lower-case vowels from the string, it can lead to some strange abbreviations. For many cases, it would be better to truncate the labels instead.

You can do this by passing any string truncation function to the label= argument of scale_* function: some good ones are stringr::str_trunc and the base R strtrim

mtcars$name <- rownames(mtcars)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(name, mpg)) +
    geom_col() +
    scale_x_discrete(label = function(x) stringr::str_trunc(x, 12)) +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5))

enter image description here

Upvotes: 9

Peyton
Peyton

Reputation: 7396

Try the abbreviate function:

qplot(Species, Sepal.Length, data=iris, geom="boxplot") +
  scale_x_discrete(label=abbreviate)

example of label abbreviation

If the defaults won't do in your case, you can define your own function:

qplot(Species, Sepal.Length, data=iris, geom="boxplot") +
  scale_x_discrete(label=function(x) abbreviate(x, minlength=7))

You can also try rotating the labels.

Upvotes: 15

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