formatVarForPlotLabel: Format parameter variable to be displayed in the labels of a plot

Description

The following workflow is used:

format the variable as a factor
wrap it across multiple lines if needed
sort (its levels) according to a grouping variable

Usage

formatVarForPlotLabel(
  data,
  paramVar = NULL,
  paramGroupVar = NULL,
  revert = FALSE,
  width = 20
)

Value

Vector with re-formatted paramVar, NULL if empty

Arguments

data: data.frame with data
paramVar: string, variable of data with parameter
paramGroupVar: (optional) character vector with variable(s) of data with grouping. If specified, the parameters will be grouped by this(these) variable(s) in the y-axis.
revert: logical, if TRUE revert the order of the levels of the variable
width: max number of characters in the codeparamVar parameter.

Author

Laure Cougnaud library(ggplot2) data(dataADaMCDISCP01) dataAE <- dataADaMCDISCP01$ADAE

# by default, groups are sorted alphabetically in ggplot2 (from bottom to top for an histogram) ggplot(data = dataAE, aes(y = AEDECOD, fill = AEBODSYS)) + geom_histogram(stat="count")

# by default: labels are set to a new line if more than 20 characters: dataAE$AEDECOD <- formatVarForPlotLabel(data = dataAE, paramVar = "AEDECOD") levels(dataAE$AEDECOD) ggplot(data = dataAE, aes(y = AEDECOD, fill = AEBODSYS)) + geom_histogram(stat="count")

# revert order of the variable dataAE$AEDECOD <- formatVarForPlotLabel(data = dataAE, paramVar = "AEDECOD", revert = TRUE) levels(dataAE$AEDECOD) ggplot(data = dataAE, aes(y = AEDECOD, fill = AEBODSYS)) + geom_histogram(stat="count")

# group based on body system dataAE$AEDECOD <- formatVarForPlotLabel(data = dataAE, paramVar = "AEDECOD", paramGroupVar = "AEBODSYS") ggplot(data = dataAE, aes(y = AEDECOD, fill = AEBODSYS)) + geom_histogram(stat="count")