Plot a character vector against a numeric vector in R

Question

I have the following data frame in R: ``` >AcceptData Mean.Rank Sentence.Type 1 2.5 An+Sp+a 2 2.6 An+Nsp+a 3 2.1 An+Sp-a 4 3.1 An+Nsp-a 5 2.4 In+Sp+a 6 1.7 In+Nsp+a 7 3.1 In+Sp-a 8 3.0 In+Nsp-a ``` Which I want to plot, with the Sentence.Type column in the x axis, with the actual name of each cell as a point in the x axis. I want the y axis to go from 1 to 4 in steps of .5 So far I haven't been able to plot this, neither with plot() not with hist(). I keep getting different types of errors, mainly because of the nature of the character column in the data.frame. I know this should be easy for most, but I'm sort of noob with R still and after hours I can't get the plot right. Any help is much appreciated. Edit: Some of the errors I've gotten: ``` > hist(AcceptData$Sentence.Type,AcceptData$Mean.Rank) Error in hist.default(AcceptData$Sentence.Type, AcceptData$Mean.Rank) : 'x' must be numeric ``` Or: (this doesn't give an error, but definitely not the graph I want. It has all the x values…

Accepted Answer

The default `plot` function has a method that allows you to plot factors on the x-axis, but to use this, you have to convert your text data to a `factor`:

Here is an example:

```
x <- letters[1:5]
y <- runif(5, 0, 5)

plot(factor(x), y)
```

And with your sample data:

```
AcceptData <- read.table(text="
Mean.Rank Sentence.Type
1       2.5       An+Sp+a
2       2.6      An+Nsp+a
3       2.1       An+Sp-a
4       3.1      An+Nsp-a
5       2.4       In+Sp+a
6       1.7      In+Nsp+a
7       3.1       In+Sp-a
8       3.0      In+Nsp-a", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

plot(Mean.Rank~factor(Sentence.Type), AcceptData, las=2, 
     xlab="", main="Mean Acceptability Ranking per Sentence")
```

Plot a character vector against a numeric vector in R

Solution

Problem