Change tick mark labels to specific strings in plotly

Question

I have plotly graphics where I'd like to change axis tick mark labels to specific strings. Consider the following example:

library(plotly)
p <- plot_ly(data = iris, x = ~Sepal.Length, y = ~Petal.Length)

Say I want to supress all numeric xaxis tick mark labels and instead only plot the string "min" at x = 4.5 and "max" at x = 8.

How can I achieve this in plotly?

Sidenote: I know this is possible for base R plots, e.g. here and in ggplot2 by setting scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(4.5, 8), labels= c("4.5" = "min", "8" = "max")).

Is there also a way to achieve this in plotly? ..Unfortunately the plotly docs don't seem to offer a solution..

I'm not sure about plotly, but you can convert a ggplot using the ggplotly function to get a similar result: p2 = ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length)) + geom_point(colour=hcl(255,100,65)) + theme_bw() + scale_x_continuous(breaks=5:8, labels=LETTERS[5:8]); ggplotly(p2). The theme can be tweaked a bit more to get closer to the p — eipi10
I'm not all that familiar with the details of plotly, but perhaps the help for ticktext could be useful. — eipi10
In case it helps, this post goes through the workings of how ggplotly pipes from ggplot2 to plotly. It shows how plotly_json(p2) would show what is being sent to plotly so that you might recreate it more directly inside your plot_ly function. moderndata.plot.ly/… — Jon Spring

symbolrush symbolrush · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12T09:34:57

Thanks to @eipi10 and @Jon Spring I could figure it out:

library(plotly)
plot_ly(data = iris, x = ~Sepal.Length, y = ~Petal.Length) %>% 
  layout(xaxis = list(tickvals = c(4.5, 8), ticktext = c("min", "max")))

This is exactly what I was searching for and produces:

Change tick mark labels to specific strings in plotly

1 Answers