Strange formatting of legend in ggplotly in R

Question

I\'m trying to turn a ggplot into a plotly. The ggplot renders fine, but when I put it through ggplotly, suddenly the legend adds parenthesis and \",1\" after the label.

Answer 1

Here's an approach that worked for me. It involves diving into the resulting plotly object and cleaning up the legend names.

The first part creates a function to detect if the plotly list element has a legend specified and then cleans it up.

clean_plotly_leg <- function(.plotly_x, .extract_str) {
  # Inpects an x$data list in a plotly object, cleans up legend values where appropriate
  if ("legendgroup" %in% names(.plotly_x)) {
    # The list includes a legend group

    .plotly_x$legendgroup <- stringr::str_extract(.plotly_x$legendgroup, .extract_str)
    .plotly_x$name <- stringr::str_extract(.plotly_x$name, .extract_str)

  }
  .plotly_x


}

The second part applies it to your example, but with an intermediate step.

sorted_plotly <-
  ggplotly(ggplot(sorted1, aes(x=as.Date(CommDate), y=PubB4))+
           geom_smooth(level=0.0, aes(colour="Moving average"), se=FALSE)+
           geom_point(aes(fill=CommName), size=4)+
           expand_limits(y=c(0,4.5))+
           geom_line(mapping=aes(y=4),colour="orangered3",size=1)+
           geom_text(mapping=aes(y=4.2, x=min(sorted1$CommDate)+4), label="Target", size=3)+
           xlab("Committee Date")+
           guides(fill=guide_legend(title="Committee Names"), colour=guide_legend(title.theme=element_blank(),title=NULL))+
           scale_x_date(labels = date_format("%b-%y"))+
           theme_light()+
           theme(plot.title=element_text(hjust=0.5, size=12),panel.grid.major.x = (element_blank()), 
                 panel.grid.minor.x = (element_blank()), 
                 axis.title = element_text(size=8), legend.title = element_text(size=10),
                 legend.text = element_text(size=8), legend.box = 'vertical', legend.spacing.y = unit(-2,"mm"))+
           scale_colour_manual(name="",values="#0072B2"))

sorted_plotly$x$data <-
  sorted_plotly$x$data %>% 
  map(clean_plotly_leg, "[^\\(][^,]*") # ie remove the opening bracket, if one exists, and extract each character up to the first comma

sorted_plotly 

I'd welcome any suggestions for making this code more efficient, but at least it works