For a variety of displays (mosaicplots, barplots, ...) one often wants to either abbreviate or wrap long labels, particularly when these are made up of several words. In general, it would be nice to have a function,
abbreviate.or.wrap <-
function(x, maxlength=10, maxlines=2, split=" ") {
}that would take a character vector or a list of vectors, x, and try to abbreviate or wrap them to fit approximately the maxlength and maxlines constraints, using the split argument to specify allowable characters to wrap to multiple lines.
For example, this two-way table has dimnames too long to be displayed nicely in a mosaicplot:
> library(catspec) > library(vcd) > > data(FHtab) > FHtab<-as.data.frame(FHtab) > > xtable <- xtabs(Freq ~ .,FHtab) > lab <- dimnames(xtable) > lab $OccFather [1] "Upper nonmanual" "Lower nonmanual" "Upper manual" "Lower manual" [5] "Farm"
$OccSon [1] "Upper nonmanual" "Lower nonmanual" "Upper manual" "Lower manual" [5] "Farm"
abbreviate works here, but gives results that aren't very readable:
> lapply(lab, abbreviate, 8)
$OccFather
Upper nonmanual Lower nonmanual Upper manual Lower manual Farm
"Upprnnmn" "Lwrnnmnl" "Uppermnl" "Lowermnl" "Farm"
$OccSon
Upper nonmanual Lower nonmanual Upper manual Lower manual Farm
"Upprnnmn" "Lwrnnmnl" "Uppermnl" "Lowermnl" "Farm"
In a related thread, Marc Schwartz proposed a solution for wrapping labels, based on
>short.labels <- sapply(labels, function(x) paste(strwrap(x,
10), collapse = "\n"), USE.NAMES = FALSE)But, my attempt to use strwrap in my context gives a single string for each set of dimension names:
> stack.lab <-function(x) { paste(strwrap(x,10), collapse = "\n") }
> lapply(lab, stack.lab)
$OccFather
[1] "Upper\nnonmanual\nLower\nnonmanual\nUpper\nmanual\nLower\nmanual\nFarm"$OccSon [1] "Upper\nnonmanual\nLower\nnonmanual\nUpper\nmanual\nLower\nmanual\nFarm"
For my particular example, I can do what I want with gsub, but it is hardly general:
> lab[[1]] <- gsub(" ","\n", lab[[1]])
> lab[[2]] <- lab[[1]] # cheating: I know it's a square table
> lab
$OccFather
[1] "Upper\nnonmanual" "Lower\nnonmanual" "Upper\nmanual" "Lower\nmanual"
[5] "Farm"
$OccSon
[1] "Upper\nnonmanual" "Lower\nnonmanual" "Upper\nmanual" "Lower\nmanual"
[5] "Farm"
> dimnames(xtable) <- lab
Then, mosaicplot(xtable, shade=TRUE) gives a nice display!
Can anyone help with a more general solution for wrapping labels or abbreviate.or.wrap()?
thanks, -Michael
-- Michael Friendly Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor, Psychology Dept. York University Voice: 416 736-5115 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814 4700 Keele Street http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/friendly.html Toronto, ONT M3J 1P3 CANADA
______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
