Order geom_bar groups

Question

I have this data:

country                name                  value
   <chr>                  <chr>                 <dbl>
 1 Germany                Jd                    7.1
 2 Germany                Jc                    8.4
 3 Germany                Ne                    1.3
 4 France                 Jd                    8.3
 5 France                 Jc                    12  
 6 France                 Ne                    3.7

and I would like to plot it in two groups of bars (with three columns each). Ordered the same as it is in the dataframe: First Germany, second France and the order of the columns Jd, Jc, Ne.

I did:

p <- ggplot(data, aes(x = country, y = value)) +
    geom_bar(aes(fill = name), width=0.7, position = position_dodge(width=0.7), stat='identity')

but I get the plot in a different order: first France, then Germany and the order of the columns Jc, Jd, Ne. (seems to be ordered alphabetically).

How can I order the bars in the way I want?

Answer 1

Probably one of the simplest ways to take control on sorting is to convert as.factor() your ordering columns and define the levels, you'll override any other default ordering:

library(ggplot2)
data$country <- factor( data$country, levels = c("Germany", "France"))
data$name    <- factor( data$name, levels = c("Jd", "Jc", "Ne"))


ggplot(data, aes(x = country, y = value,fill = name)) +
# moved the aes() all together, nothing related to the question
geom_bar(width=0.7, position position_dodge(width=0.7), stat='identity')

---

With data:

data <- read.table(text = "
country                name                  value
  Germany                Jd                    7.1
  Germany                Jc                    8.4
  Germany                Ne                    1.3
  France                 Jd                    8.3
  France                 Jc                    12  
  France                 Ne                    3.7",header = T)