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I am building a plot with ggplot but I do not know the name of the y column in advance. Instead the name of the y column is contained in the variable yname. This obviously doesn't work: 

ggplot(df, aes(x=date, y=yname))

Because ggplot looks for a column in df that is literally named "yname". How can I pass the name of the y column to ggplot as a variable?

andrew
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1 Answers1

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Using aes_string:

library(ggplot2)
yname <- "a"
df <- data.frame(x=runif(10), a=runif(10))
ggplot(df, aes_string(x="x", y=yname)) + geom_point()
lukeA
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  • `aes_string` is soft deprecated. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/55133909/5477070 for a more up to date answer. – jarauh Feb 22 '21 at 18:28