R: Creates an independent copy of a ggplot layer object

cloneLayer

R Documentation

Creates an independent copy of a ggplot layer object

Description

Creates copies of ggplot layers from within ggplot objects that are independent of the parent object.

Usage

cloneLayer(l, verbose = FALSE, showDefaults = TRUE)

Arguments

`l`	ggplot2 object layer
`verbose`	toggle to control if the output is ggproto object (verbose==FALSE,default) or string of layer call (verbose==TRUE)
`showDefaults`	toggle to control if the verbose output shows all the input arguments passed to the proto object (if verbose==FALSE then ignored)

Details

ggplot objects are comprimsed of layer objects. Once compiled they are part of the plot object environment and if they are changed internally regardless of where they are in the (ie different environment) it will change the original plot. This function allows to create replicates of the plot layers and edit them independent of the original plot. When setting verbose to TRUE function returns the ggplot2 call as a string to paste in regular ggplot script to generate the layer.

Value

ggproto or string object (conditional on verbose)

Examples

p <- ggplot2::ggplot(iris,ggplot2::aes(x =Sepal.Length,y=Sepal.Width))

p <- p + 
ggplot2::geom_point(ggplot2::aes(colour='Species')) + 
ggplot2::geom_line()

p$layers[[1]]

newLayer <- cloneLayer(l=p$layers[[1]])

all.equal(p$layers[[1]],newLayer)

(v <- cloneLayer(l=p$layers[[1]],verbose=TRUE))

eval(parse(text=v))

all.equal(p$layers[[1]],eval(parse(text=v)))