The 'ggplot2pipes' package

2018-02-27

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a project (no matter how small!) is completed until there’s a package for it.

I wrapped up my previous post on using pipes with ggplot2 into the ggplot2pipes package.

In summary:

  • ggplot2pipes is a package for creating pipe-enabled versions of ggplot2 functions.
  • You can find it on github.
  • Install: devtools::install_github("coolbutuseless/ggplot2pipes")
  • This supercedes the pipify package from 2015.

Basic Usage

  1. Call init_ggplot2_pipes() to create all the pipe-enabled functions.
    • This will create a version of the ggplot function prefixed with “add_”, e.g. the function geom_point() becomes the pipe-enabled function called add_geom_point()
  2. Use the new functions with dplyr/magrittr pipes
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggplot2pipes)

init_ggplot2_pipes()

ggplot(mtcars) %>%
  add_geom_line(aes(mpg, wt)) %>%
  add_labs(title="hello") %>%
  add_theme_bw() %>%
  add_facet_wrap(~am)

Advanced Usage

  • The list of functions which are pipe-enabled is controlled by the regular expression argument func_regex. By default this captures most geoms and stats and a few other core things.
  • The default prefix for the new pipe-enabled functions is add_, but you can change this with the prefix argument. Note that the prefix can even be set to the empty string if you want to try evil/confusing things like:
init_ggplot2_pipes(prefix='')

ggplot(mtcars) %>%
  geom_line(aes(mpg, wt)) %>%
  labs(title="hello") %>%
  theme_bw() %>%
  facet_wrap(~am)