How do I change the formatting of numbers on an axis with ggplot

Question

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  lt - ggplot valids  aes x Test  y Values       geom point position  quot jitter quot       facet grid     Facet      scale y continuous name  quot Fluorescent intensity arbitrary units quot       scale x discrete name  quot Test repeat quot       stat summary fun ymin median  fun ymax median  fun y median  geom  quot crossbar quot    Any help much appreciated

User · Accepted Answer

I also found another way of doing this that gives proper 'x10(superscript)5' notation on the axes. I'm posting it here in the hope it might be useful to some. I got the code from here so I claim no credit for it, that rightly goes to Brian Diggs.

fancy_scientific <- function(l) {
     # turn in to character string in scientific notation
     l <- format(l, scientific = TRUE)
     # quote the part before the exponent to keep all the digits
     l <- gsub("^(.*)e", "'\\1'e", l)
     # turn the 'e+' into plotmath format
     l <- gsub("e", "%*%10^", l)
     # return this as an expression
     parse(text=l)
}

Which you can then use as

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
   geom_point() +
   scale_y_continuous(labels=fancy_scientific)

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  lt - function l     l  lt - 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

User · Answer

x  lt - rnorm 10    100000 y  lt - seq 0  1  length   10  p  lt - qplot x  y  library scales  p   scale x continuous labels   comma

User · Answer

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

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

Examples related to r

Examples related to ggplot2