Question

I have a table barplot (basic table with counts of each level for a factor) where the category names along the x axis are longer than I would like them to be. This is true even after making them perpendicular and adjusting the margins.

How can I shorten either these labels or each catagory name in the table to be only the first n characters?

Example:
How would make the labels for: barplot(table(factor(c("azzzz", "bzzzz", "bzzzz", "czzzz")))) be a,b, and c.

Answer 1

Just take substrings of the vector you are passing to table:

barplot(table(substr(c("azzzz", "bzzzz", "bzzzz", "czzzz"),1,1)))

EDIT

Now that I think about it, you probably need the full strings for table to match them up correctly. In which case maybe split it into separate steps:

tbl <- table(c("azzzz", "bzzzz", "bzzzz", "czzzz"))
names(tbl) <- substr(names(tbl),1,1)
barplot(tbl)

You can also pass them directly into barplot:

barplot(...,names.arg = substr(...,1,1))