How to crop out part of date range in ggplot-CodePudding

I need to plot some data over time. However, data is missing for a large part of the time series. I'd like to remove the whole section with missing data from the middle of the graph.

Here's the data

# Setup 
library(tidyverse)
library(patchwork)

# Set seed 
set.seed(123)

# Generate data
df_test <- 
  tibble(
    date = seq(as.Date("2010-1-1"), as.Date("2015-1-1"), by = "months"),
    value = rnorm(n = length(date), mean = 10, sd = 1)) %>% 
  mutate( # Create missing values
    value = ifelse(
      date > as.Date("2010-03-20") & date < as.Date("2011-01-14"), 
      NA, 
      value))

Here's the graph with no cropping

# Graph full range
gg_full <- 
  df_test %>% 
  ggplot(
    aes(
      x = date, 
      y = value))  
  geom_point()   
  geom_step()

I want to remove the dates with missing values from the x-axis. Here's a photoshop with "-//-" where I've excised the dates.

Attempted solution

I tried creating two separate graphs and plot them side by side with patchwork.

# Graph first part only
gg_first <- 
  df_test %>%
  filter(date <= as.Date("2010-03-20")) %>% 
  ggplot(
    aes(
      x = date, 
      y = value))  
  geom_point()   
  geom_step()

# Graph latter part only
gg_latter <- 
  df_test %>%
  filter(date >= as.Date("2011-01-14")) %>% 
  ggplot(
    aes(
      x = date, 
      y = value))  
  geom_point()   
  geom_step()

# Layout plots 
gg_first   gg_latter   
  patchwork::plot_layout(widths = c(1, 6))

However, this messes up the x-axis scale and involves a lot of manually removing elements like the y-axis labels from the right-hand but not the left-hand graph. However, I might simply be failing to use patchwork to its full potential.

CodePudding user response：

One option is ggbreak:

library(ggbreak)
gg_full  
  scale_x_break(c(ymd("2010-03-25"), ymd("2011-01-10")))  
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "1 year", date_labels = "%Y")  
  theme(axis.text.x.top = element_blank(), axis.ticks.x.top = element_blank())