[r] How do I change the formatting of numbers on an axis with ggplot?

I'm using R and ggplot to draw a scatterplot of some data, all is fine except that the numbers on the y-axis are coming out with computer style exponent formatting, i.e. 4e+05, 5e+05, etc. This is unacceptable to me, so I want to get it to display them as 500,000, 400,000, and so on. Getting a proper exponent notation would also be acceptable.

The code for the plot is as follows:

p <- ggplot(valids, aes(x=Test, y=Values)) +
  geom_point(position="jitter") +
  facet_grid(. ~ Facet) +
  scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units") +
  scale_x_discrete(name="Test repeat") +
  stat_summary(fun.ymin=median, fun.ymax=median, fun.y=median, geom="crossbar")

Any help much appreciated.

I find Jack Aidley's suggested answer a useful one.

I wanted to throw out another option. Suppose you have a series with many small numbers, and you want to ensure the axis labels write out the full decimal point (e.g. 5e-05 -> 0.0005), then:

NotFancy <- function(l) {
 l <- format(l, scientific = FALSE)
 parse(text=l)
}

ggplot(data = data.frame(x = 1:100, 
                         y = seq(from=0.00005,to = 0.0000000000001,length.out=100) + runif(n=100,-0.0000005,0.0000005)), 
       aes(x=x, y=y)) +
     geom_point() +
     scale_y_continuous(labels=NotFancy) 

I'm late to the game here but in-case others want an easy solution, I created a set of functions which can be called like:

 ggplot + scale_x_continuous(labels = human_gbp)

which give you human readable numbers for x or y axes (or any number in general really).

You can find the functions here: Github Repo Just copy the functions in to your script so you can call them.

Another option is to format your axis tick labels with commas is by using the package scales, and add

 scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = comma)

to your ggplot statement.

If you don't want to load the package, use:

scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = scales::comma)

x <- rnorm(10) * 100000
y <- seq(0, 1, length = 10)
p <- qplot(x, y)
library(scales)
p + scale_x_continuous(labels = comma)