passing parameters to ggplot

Question

would like to create a function that generates graphs using ggplot. For the sake of simplicity, the typical graph may be

ggplot(car, aes(x=speed, y=dist)) +          


        

Answer 1

One approach that I can think of is using match.call() to reach the variable names contained by the parameters/arguments passed to the custom plotting function and then use eval() on them. In this way you avoid passing them as quoted to your custom function, if you do not like that.

library(ggplot2)

fun <- function(df, x, y) {
    arg <- match.call()
    ggplot(df, aes(x = eval(arg$x), y = eval(arg$y))) + geom_point()
} 
fun(mpg, cty, hwy) # no need to pass the variables (column names) as quoted / as strings