Order of dates is not chronological in ggplot2

Question

I\'m trying to make a graph to depict a population over a period of time. However, the dates are not in chronological order. In the imported CSV the dates are all correct an

Answer 1

Convert to a Date class:

sumc$Date = as.Date(sumc$Date, format = "%m/%d%/Y")

Then your same plotting code will work just fine.

See ?as.Date or strptime for details about the conversion or the format argument.

Answer 2

If your dates are imported in the correct order in the data frame, use

sumc$Date <- factor(sumc$Date, ordered = T)

prior to plotting. This will make them as ordered factors based on the order they appear, and ggplot will understand that it has to keep them that way.

Edit: if the dates are not ordered, you can order them and save to a vector:

dates <- unique(sort(sumc$Date))
sumc$Date <- factor(sumc$Date, labels = dates,  ordered = T)