Little useless-useful R functions – Use pipe %>% in ggplot2

Using pipe %>% or chaining commands is very intuitive for creating following set of commands for data preparation. Visualization library ggplot in this manner uses sign “+” (plus) to do all the chaining. What if we would have to replace with the pipe sign?

So image your typical ggplot command:

library(ggplot2)

#sample DataSet
iris <- iris
ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour = Species)) + geom_point()

Which produces a typical graph:

And for the sake of useless functionality, what if the ggplot command would have used a pipe? The code would look like:

gggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour = Species)) 
              %>% geom_point()
              %>% theme_bw()

Pretty nifty and still very useless.

With the help of the “ToPipe” function, this can be achieved:

ToPipe <- function(ee) {
  this_fn <- rlang::call_name(ee)
  updated_args <- rlang::call_args(ee)
  
  if (identical(this_fn, "%>%") || length(updated_args)==0) {
    fn_2 <- rlang::call2("+", !!!updated_args)
    eval(fn_2)
  } else {
   eval(ee)
  }
}


### pipe version
fun <- quote(ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour = Species)) 
              %>% geom_point())
ToPipe(fun)

As always, code is available in at the Github in same Useless_R_function repository.

Happy R-coding!