R: “Unary operator error” from multiline ggplot2 command

Question

I\'m using ggplot2 to do a boxplot comparison of two different species, as indicated by the third column shown below:

> library(reshape2)
> library(ggp         


        

Answer 1

This is a well-known nuisance when posting multiline commands in R. (You can get different behavior when you source() a script to when you copy-and-paste the lines, both with multiline and comments)

Rule: always put the dangling '+' at the end of a line so R knows the command is unfinished:

ggplot(...) + geom_whatever1(...) +
  geom_whatever2(...) +
  stat_whatever3(...) +
  geom_title(...) + scale_y_log10(...)

Don't put the dangling '+' at the start of the line, since that tickles the error:

Error in "+ geom_whatever2(...) invalid argument to unary operator"

And obviously don't put dangling '+' at both end and start since that's a syntax error.

So, learn a habit of being consistent: always put '+' at end-of-line.

cf. answer to "Split code over multiple lines in an R script"