ggplot2 (version 3.3.6)

aes_: Define aesthetic mappings programmatically

Description

Aesthetic mappings describe how variables in the data are mapped to visual properties (aesthetics) of geoms. aes() uses non-standard evaluation to capture the variable names. aes_() and aes_string() require you to explicitly quote the inputs either with "" for aes_string(), or with quote or ~ for aes_(). (aes_q() is an alias to aes_()). This makes aes_() and aes_string() easy to program with.

Usage

aes_(x, y, ...)
aes_string(x, y, ...)
aes_q(x, y, ...)

Arguments

x, y, ...

List of name value pairs. Elements must be either quoted calls, strings, one-sided formulas or constants.

Life cycle

All these functions are soft-deprecated. Please use tidy evaluation idioms instead (see the quasiquotation section in aes() documentation).

Details

aes_string() and aes_() are particularly useful when writing functions that create plots because you can use strings or quoted names/calls to define the aesthetic mappings, rather than having to use substitute() to generate a call to aes().

I recommend using aes_(), because creating the equivalents of aes(colour = "my colour") or aes(x = `X$1`) with aes_string() is quite clunky.

See Also

aes()

Examples

# Three ways of generating the same aesthetics
aes(mpg, wt, col = cyl)
aes_(quote(mpg), quote(wt), col = quote(cyl))
aes_(~mpg, ~wt, col = ~cyl)
aes_string("mpg", "wt", col = "cyl")

# You can't easily mimic these calls with aes_string
aes(`$100`, colour = "smooth")
aes_(~ `$100`, colour = "smooth")
# Ok, you can, but it requires a _lot_ of quotes
aes_string("`$100`", colour = '"smooth"')

# Convert strings to names with as.name
var <- "cyl"
aes(col = x)
aes_(col = as.name(var))