How to set limits for axes in ggplot2 R plots

Question

I plot the following   library ggplot2       carrots  lt - data frame length   rnorm 500000  10000  10000   cukes  lt - data frame length   rnorm 50000  10000  20000   carrots veg  lt -  carrot  cukes veg  lt -  cuke  vegLengths  lt - rbind carrots  cukes   ggplot vegLengths  aes length  fill   veg      geom density alpha   0 2    Now say I only want to plot the region between x -5000 to 5000  instead of the entire range   How can I do that

User · Answer

Quick note  if you re also using coord flip   to flip the x and the y axis  you won t be able to set range limits using coord cartesian   because those two functions are exclusive  see here    Fortunately  this is an easy fix  set your limits within coord flip   like so   p   coord flip ylim   c 3 5   xlim   c 100  400     This just alters the visible range  i e  doesn t remove data points

User · Answer

Basically you have two options  scale x continuous limits   c -5000  5000     or  coord cartesian xlim   c -5000  5000      Where the first removes all data points outside the given range and the second only adjusts the visible area  In most cases you would not see the difference  but if you fit anything to the data it would probably change the fitted values   You can also use the shorthand function xlim  or ylim   which like the first option removes data points outside of the given range     xlim -5000  5000    For more information check the description of coord cartesian   The RStudio cheatsheet for ggplot2 makes this quite clear visually  Here is a small section of that cheatsheet     Distributed under CC BY

[r] How to set limits for axes in ggplot2 R plots?

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