Change number of labels on ggplot2 graphic in R

Question

I am trying to display data over some years and my labels on the x axis overlap each other.

I generate the plot as follows

plotData<-subset(myData,myData$category=="value")

test <- ggplot(plotData, aes(x=date, y=value, group=name))
test + geom_line(aes(color=name))

if I add

 + theme(axis.text.x  = element_text(angle=45))

it is slightly better, but still very crowded.

Is there any option to specify how many labels there should be per axis, or an option just to display every 10th label?

Answer 1

You can use scale_x_date() with the date_breaks argument. An example with some dummy data:

df <- data.frame(x = seq.Date(as.Date("2000-01-01"), by = 1, length.out = 1000), y = rep(1:10, each = 100))

df %>%
  ggplot() +
  geom_line(aes(x, y)) +
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "26 weeks")