Label date/times

label_date() and label_time() label date/times using date/time format strings. label_date_short() automatically constructs a short format string sufficient to uniquely identify labels. It's inspired by matplotlib's ConciseDateFormatter, but uses a slightly different approach: ConciseDateFormatter formats "firsts" (e.g. first day of month, first day of day) specially; date_short() formats changes (e.g. new month, new year) specially.

label_date(format = "%Y-%m-%d", tz = "UTC", locale = NULL)

label_date_short(format = c("%Y", "%b", "%d", "%H:%M"), sep = "\n")

label_time(format = "%H:%M:%S", tz = "UTC", locale = NULL)

Arguments

format

For date_format() and time_format() a date/time format string using standard POSIX specification. See strptime() for details.

For date_short() a character vector of length 4 giving the format components to use for year, month, day, and hour respectively.

tz

a time zone name, see timezones(). Defaults to UTC

locale

Locale to use when for day and month names. The default uses the current locale. Setting this argument requires stringi, and you can see a complete list of supported locales with stringi::stri_locale_list().

sep

Separator to use when combining date formats into a single string.

Value

All label_() functions return a "labelling" function, i.e. a function that takes a vector x and returns a character vector of length(x) giving a label for each input value. Labelling functions are designed to be used with the labels argument of ggplot2 scales. The examples demonstrate their use with x scales, but they work similarly for all scales, including those that generate legends rather than axes.

Examples

date_range <- function(start, days) {
  start <- as.POSIXct(start)
  c(start, start + days * 24 * 60 * 60)
}

two_months <- date_range("2020-05-01", 60)
demo_datetime(two_months)
#> scale_x_datetime()

demo_datetime(two_months, labels = date_format("%m/%d"))
#> scale_x_datetime(labels = date_format("%m/%d"))

demo_datetime(two_months, labels = date_format("%e %b", locale = "fr"))
#> scale_x_datetime(labels = date_format("%e %b", locale = "fr"))

demo_datetime(two_months, labels = date_format("%e %B", locale = "es"))
#> scale_x_datetime(labels = date_format("%e %B", locale = "es"))

# ggplot2 provides a short-hand:
demo_datetime(two_months, date_labels = "%m/%d")
#> scale_x_datetime(date_labels = "%m/%d")


# An alternative labelling system is label_date_short()
demo_datetime(two_months, date_breaks = "7 days", labels = label_date_short())
#> scale_x_datetime(date_breaks = "7 days", labels = label_date_short())

# This is particularly effective for dense labels
one_year <- date_range("2020-05-01", 365)
demo_datetime(one_year, date_breaks = "month")
#> scale_x_datetime(date_breaks = "month")

demo_datetime(one_year, date_breaks = "month", labels = label_date_short())
#> scale_x_datetime(date_breaks = "month", labels = label_date_short())