R plotly x axis character / factor (combination number and -). plot only showing axis that contain numbers only. bug?

Question

I am trying to use plotly to plot a bar chart with strings (combination number) as x-axis.
("1", "2", "3", "4 - 5", "6 - 8","9 - 13", "14 - 21", "22 - 34", "35 - 55")

However, Only 3 data is being ploted. ("1", "2", "3")

Here is the code:

library(plotly)

dfb = structure(groups = c("1", "2", "3", "4 - 5", "6 - 8",
                        "9 - 13", "14 - 21", "22 - 34", "35 - 55"),
    counts = c(29090,10074, 4573, 4029, 2289, 1120, 337, 78, 15)),
  class = c("data.frame"),
  row.names = c(NA,-9L),
  .Names = c("groups","counts")
)

  plot_ly(dfb,
      x = groups,
      y = counts,
      type = "bar")

returns:

But if I filtered on of groups that contain only numbers, it is working well:

  dfc=subset(dfb,dfb$groups!='1')
  plot_ly(dfc,
      x = groups,
      y = counts,
      type = "bar")

Why is this happening? And how to solve this?

I'm using plotly because I want to used it with Shiny, and for now it is the most fit for me.

I didn't use ggplotly (make ggplot and then convert it to plotly) because sometimes axis tittle being cut off.

Answer 1

I'm afraid this is a duplicated question: Plotly R: Cant get points to plot when two values present per x factor level. However here you have a couple of solutions:

Solution 1 (also proposed in the referred question):

library(plotly)

dfb = data.frame(groups= c("1", "2", "3", "4 - 5", "6 - 8","9 - 13", "14 - 21", "22 - 34", "35 - 55"),
            counts=c(29090,10074, 4573, 4029, 2289, 1120, 337, 78, 15))

plot_ly(dfb,
   x = groups,
   y = counts,
   type = "bar") %>%
   layout(xaxis=list(type='category'))

Solution 2 (way less elegant)

groups_str <- c("1", "2", "3", "4 - 5", "6 - 8","9 - 13", "14 - 21", "22 - 34", "35 - 55")
groups <- 1:length(groups_str)

dfb = data.frame(groups= groups,
            counts=c(29090,10074, 4573, 4029, 2289, 1120, 337, 78, 15))

plot_ly(dfb,
   x = groups,
   y = counts,
   type = "bar") %>%
   layout(xaxis=list(tickmode='array', tickvals=groups, ticktext=groups_str))

Both produce the figure (with different xaxis title, though)