Multiple Lines for Text per Legend Label in ggplot2

Question

I\'m trying to deal with very long labels for a legend in a bar plot (see picture included and the code i used to produce it. I need to break them down in multiple (rows of)

Answer 1

You can use str_wrap for automated wrapping of long strings or you can hard code breaks by adding \n (the line break character) to a string. To add space between the legend keys, you can use the legend.key.height theme element. Here's an example with the built-in iris data frame:

library(stringr)
library(tidyverse)

# Create long labels to be wrapped
iris$Species = paste(iris$Species, 
                     "random text to make the labels much much longer than the original labels")

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour=str_wrap(Species,20))) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(colour="Long title shortened\nwith wrapping") +
  theme(legend.key.height=unit(2, "cm"))