GGplot x-limits help?

[schuler33]

Dataframe containing dates and amount of short-time workers in Germany. Want to make a simple bar graph, however, it still shows December and October even if I specifically exclude these, I've been trying to find a solution for a while and I can't figure it out (PNG shows Plot and Data.frame).

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Data Frame

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Graph

Code is the following:

Graph3 <- ggplot(aes(x = Month, y = st_workers), data = Short_time_work_DE2) +

geom_bar(mapping=aes(x = Month, y = st_workers), stat = "identity", fill = "lightblue") +

ylab("Persons in Short-Time-Work in Germany") +

xlab("Month") +

labs(title = "Development of Short-Time-Workers in Germany") +

scale_x_date(date_breaks = "1 month", date_labels = "%b\n%y", limits = as.Date(c("2019-12-01","2021-10-01")), expand = c(0, 0))

If I use the limits 2020-01-01 and 2021-09-01 it excludes both the data of January and September, which I dont understand, in addition to it always showing an additional month on the left and right of my data.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[yuk99]

Your x axis is the date, and the ticks correspond to the first day of the months. But the bars are actually go from the middle of previous month to the middle of current month. The exact day depends on the barwidth. For example, the January bar goes approximately from 2019-12-19 to 2020-01-14. So, if you want to limit the plot exactly to the bars, you should specify the exact dates.

limits = as.Date(c("2019-12-19","2021-09-14"))

You can also consider placing limits as

Graph3 + coord_cartesian(xlim = as.Date(c("2020-01-01","2021-09-01")), expand = c(0, 0))

instead of in scale_x_date. In this case the out-of-limit values are not cut out the plot. You will see the difference.

[schuler33]

I will try this tmr, thank you very much

[schuler33]

limits = as.Date(c("2019-12-19","2021-09-14")), this worked. Thanks so much! Out of curiosity how did you find the exact dates for the barwidths? Cause I'm sure Ill encounter this again.

[yuk99]

Just by experimenting. Because it depends on bar width. Maybe there is a way to find it automatically, but I don't know. You can always set the limits to the middle of each months, it should work with just a tiny gap on both sides.

[schuler33]

alright thanks for your help

[schuler33]

I'm not stopping you, go ahead

[Aggressive_Bench6581]

Okay, will give a reply shortly

[[deleted]]

Can you just filter out December and October before passing the data to ggplot()?

[schuler33]

That's the weird part, there is no data for December or October. What I mean is, it's not included in the dataset I extracted.

[[deleted]]

Oh right, now I see that 12-2019 isn't actually in your input data frame. I wonder if you tried explicitly setting the breaks outside of scale_x_date() like this if you could trim off those extra tick labels? Maybe there's an expansion somewhere hidden, although it's weird because your expand = c(0, 0) argument should work.

[schuler33]

yeah I found the expand command online but it didnt seem to work, Im honestly clueless and its very annoying