Reverse order in R leaflet continuous legend

Question

I am trying to reverse the value display of my leaflet legend in R. This post covers categorical data, but I am working with continuous data. Here's a toy example:

map <- leaflet() %>% addProviderTiles('Esri.WorldTopoMap')
x <- 1:100
pal <- colorNumeric(c("#d7191c","#fdae61","#ffffbf","#abd9e9", "#2c7bb6"), x)
map %>% addLegend('topright', pal=pal, values=x)

I'd like the legend to read 100 at the top and 1 on the bottom with the colors reversed. I can certainly reverse the colors in colorNumeric(), but reversing the order of the labels is harder. I have tried reversing the order of the values in x, and I even fiddled with the labelFormat() parameter for addLegend() to reference a lookup table of reversed values... nothing seems to work. Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

Unfortunately the accepted answer to this will get the numbers out of alignment (in fact exactly reversed) from the colours they represent.

Here's the original proposed solution, which I say is incorrect:

map <- leaflet() %>% addProviderTiles('Esri.WorldTopoMap')
x <- 1:100
pal <- colorNumeric(c("#d7191c","#fdae61","#ffffbf","#abd9e9", "#2c7bb6"), x)
map %>% addLegend('topright', pal=pal, values=x)

# This solution shows 100 as red
map %>% addLegend('topright',
                  pal = pal, 
                  values = x, 
                  labFormat = labelFormat(transform = function(x) sort(x, decreasing = TRUE)))

But if you've been using the pal() function to draw anything on your map, you now have it exactly wrong.

# But 100 is blue, not red
plot(1, 1, pch = 19, cex = 3, col = pal(100))

I think the solution is to define to functions that allocate colours to numbers, one in reverse for the legend, and one for actually drawing things:

pal_rev <- colorNumeric(c("#d7191c","#fdae61","#ffffbf","#abd9e9", "#2c7bb6"), x, reverse = TRUE)

map %>% addLegend('topright',
                  pal = pal_rev, 
                  values = x, 
                  labFormat = labelFormat(transform = function(x) sort(x, decreasing = TRUE)))

This gives us a legend that matches anything we will have drawn ie 100 is now correctly shown to be blue: