Formatting Dates on X Axis in Ggplot2

Formatting dates on X axis in ggplot2

Can you use date as a factor?

Yes, but you probably shouldn't.

...or should you use as.Date on a date column?

Yes.

Which leads us to this:

library(scales)
df$Month <- as.Date(df$Month)
ggplot(df, aes(x = Month, y = AvgVisits)) + 
  geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
  theme_bw() +
  labs(x = "Month", y = "Average Visits per User") +
  scale_x_date(labels = date_format("%m-%Y"))

in which I've added stat = "identity" to your geom_bar call.

In addition, the message about the binwidth wasn't an error. An error will actually say "Error" in it, and similarly a warning will always say "Warning" in it. Otherwise it's just a message.

Formatting x axis with different dates in ggplot2

You should set the breaks argument in scale_x_date as the same object that you assigned to labels.

scale_x_date(labels = as.Date(df1$Date, format="%d/%m/%Y"), 
breaks = as.Date(df1$Date, format="%d/%m/%Y"))

How to format date on x-axis to month and year in R

In the following, I have added group = year(date) to aesthetics so that line will connect only those points in the same year.

The
scale_x_date(date_labels = "%b-%Y") is to have monthly ticks - not sure if you still want this.

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

ggplot(MeanCPUE, aes(x=date, y=mean_cpue, group = year(date)))+
geom_line() +
geom_point()+
labs(title = "Mean Density", y = "Mean Density (# fish/100m2)", x = "Date") +
theme_bw() + 
theme(panel.border = element_blank(), panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), axis.line = element_line(colour = "black"),
                   axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90))  +
   scale_x_date(date_breaks = '1 year', date_labels = "%b-%Y") 

R, Format date on X axis using ggplot

You're right, your date format is not read as it should be (it seems to be read as Year-Month-Day).

You can modify the date format for example by using the function dmy from lubridate package to indicate r to read the date as Day-Month-Year:

library(lubridate)
df$DATE <- dmy(df$DATE)

ggplot(df, aes(x = DATE, y = value, color = variable))+
  geom_line()

Is it what you are looking for ?

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

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

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

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

How to make dates in x-axis equidistant in ggplot2 (geom_area) and format date as %d %b %Y

This seems tricky. geom_area does not plot when x is a factor.
However, given you want equidistant dates, we can use rank.

sex <- c('F','F','F',
         'M','M','M')

date <- c("26/11/2018","08/02/2020","08/09/2020", 
          "26/11/2018","08/02/2020","08/09/2020")

percentage <- c(40, 30, 20, 60, 70, 80)          


df <- data.frame(sex, 
             as.Date(date, format = "%d/%m/%Y"),
             percentage)

area1 <- ggplot(df, aes(rank(date), percentage,fill=sex)) + 
  geom_area()+
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(0,100,10))+
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = rank(df$date),
                     labels = format(df$date, "%d/%m/%Y")) +
  scale_fill_brewer(labels=c("Female","Male"),palette ="Paired")

plot(area1)

Format x-axis in ggplot2 with overlapping dates without rotation and with newline insert

You can improve your plot by passing only the unique dates for the x-axis breaks and use the guide argument to offset the labels (you can use the n.dodge value within guide_axis() to set the number of offset rows). I don't think you'll be able to avoid tinkering with the text size and date format if you have a lot of breaks but try to use an abridged format if possible.

df <- data.frame(Sample_date, Taxon, Value)

df$Sample_date <- as.Date(df$Sample_date)

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(df, aes(x = Sample_date, y = Value, fill = Taxon)) + 
  geom_area(stat = "identity", position = "stack") +
  scale_x_date(breaks = unique(df$Sample_date),
               guide = guide_axis(n.dodge = 2),
               labels = function(x) format(x, "%d %b %y")) +
  theme(
    axis.text = element_text(size = 18), 
    plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0, size = 18), 
    legend.text = element_text(size = 18), 
    legend.key.size = unit(1.5, "cm"), 
    legend.position = "bottom", 
    legend.title = element_blank(), 
    axis.title.y = element_text(size = 18), 
    axis.ticks.x = element_blank(), 
    panel.grid.minor.x = element_blank(), 
    plot.margin = unit(c(0.2, 2, -0.2, 0), "cm")
  ) +
  ggtitle("Distribution 2019") +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = function(x) format(x, big.mark = " ", scientific = FALSE)) + 
  labs(x = "", y = "cells/liter")

Using ggplot scale_x_datetime() to set first date on x axis

library(ggplot2)
dat <- data.frame(date = seq(as.Date("2020-03-05 17:00:00", 
                                     format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), 
                             as.Date("2022-03-05 17:00:00", 
                                     format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), 
                             length=18000))
dat$x <- rnorm(18000)
dat$date <- as.POSIXct(dat$date)                  


ggplot(dat, aes(x=date, y=x)) + 
  geom_line() + 
  theme_classic() + 
  scale_x_datetime(breaks= seq(min(dat$date), max(dat$date), length=6), 
                   date_labels="%b-%y")

^{Created on 2022-05-03 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

ggplot2 and date on x-axis

Your Mo_Yr column is not of class Date. However, even more importantly, it's not formatted the way R needs a date to be formatted. (I'm guessing from context that it goes M/D/Y, but R doesn't know that).

The lubridate package (which you'd have to install) is a good way to parse a date from a format. In your case:

library(lubridate)
library(scales)
library(ggplot2)

# the important line:
df26$date <- as.Date(parse_date_time(df26$Mo_Yr, "%m/%d/%y"))

print(ggplot(df26, aes(date, Vol_Tot)) + 
    geom_line() + 
    scale_x_date(labels=date_format("%b-%y")) + 
    xlab("Date") + 
    ylab("Total Volume"))

Add point to line graph in ggplot when x axis is in Date format

When you have "2012-01-1", R considers this character data. You need to make it a date.

geom_point(aes(x = as.Date("2012-01-01"), y=3000), size = 1, colour = "Red")

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