r - Displaying a greater than or equal sign

Question

I have a plot which is generated thus:

ggplot(dt.2, aes(x=AgeGroup, y=Prevalence)) + 
    geom_errorbar(aes(ymin=lower, ymax=upper), colour="black", width=.2) +
    geom_point(size=2, colour="Red")

I control the x axis labels like this:

scale_x_discrete(labels=c("0-29","30-49","50-64","65-79",">80","All")) +

This works but I need to change the ">80" label to "≥80".

However "≥80" is displayed as "=80".

How can I display the greater than or equal sign ?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13192984/displaying-a-greater-than-or-equal-sign

Answer 1

An alternative to using expressions is Unicode characters, in this case Unicode Character 'GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO' (U+2265). Copying @mnel's example

.d <- data.frame(a = letters[1:6], y = 1:6)

ggplot(.d, aes(x=a,y=y)) + geom_point() + 
    scale_x_discrete(labels = c(letters[1:5], "u2265 80"))

Unicode is a good alternative if you have trouble remembering the complicated expression syntax or if you need linebreaks, which expressions don't allow. As a downside, whether specific Unicode characters work at all depends on your graphics device and font of choice.