CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2
Jaccar
Jaccar

Reputation: 1854

Data missing when use limits in ggplot [R]

I am making a time series using bars in ggplot. For some reason the data isn't plotting for the first and last month. I think this is something to do with the limits - presumably the boundaries of the limits are excluded. However, when I extend the limits (so they go from December 2015 to January 2019 in this example), while there isn't any data for those months, the labels now start at December.

I introduced the limits originally because different plots were starting in different months (I don't know why - one was line and one was bar, so might be to do with different arguments, but still seemed odd to me). I want these to match, so thought having control over the limits would help. They do now match, but the bar version has the issues outlined.

I am looking for a solution where:

Here is my code:

library(ggplot2)
library(lubridate)

num_month <- seq(from = as.Date("2016-01-01"), to = Sys.Date(), by='month')
month_data <- as.data.frame(matrix(0, ncol = 0, nrow = length(num_month)))
month_data$month <- as.POSIXct(num_month)
month_data$freq <- sample(100, size = nrow(month_data), replace = TRUE)
today <- as.POSIXct(Sys.Date())
date_lims <- c(as.POSIXct("2016-01-01", format = "%Y-%m-%d"), today)
ggplot(month_data, aes(x = month, y = freq)) + 
  geom_bar(stat = "identity") + 
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5, size = 12)) +
  scale_x_datetime(labels = date_format("%b-%y"), breaks = date_breaks("2 months"), 
                   limits = date_lims)

Here is what it looks like:

Generated plot

Thanks for your help!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 284

Answers (1)

Jon Spring
Jon Spring

Reputation: 67040

ggplot(month_data, aes(x = month, y = freq)) + 
  geom_bar(stat = "identity") + 
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5, size = 12)) +
  scale_x_datetime(date_labels = "%b-%y", date_breaks = "2 months", 
                   limits = date_lims, expand = c(0,0))

This seems to work for me. I think the expand = c(0,0) part is what you were missing; this tells ggplot not to add any padding to the sides, as is default.

enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

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