building patchwork plot programmatically

Question

All of the patchwork documentation describes building a plot with p1+p2+p3+p4 (or p1 | p2 | ...)

I would like to build a patchwork plot from a list of ggplot objects, where I do not know the number of plots in advance.

I can make a list of plots, and make the final page with:

final.plot <- p_list[[1]] | p_list[[2]] | p_list[[3]]

But I have not figured out how to make a plot with

final.plot <- NULL
for (i in 1:length(p_list)){
  final.plot <- final.plot | p_list[[i]]
}

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

To programmatically create a patchwork from a list of plots the patchwork package provides patchwork::wrap_plots():

library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)

p_list <- replicate(4, ggplot(mtcars, aes(hp, mpg)) +
  geom_point(), simplify = FALSE)

p_list |> 
  wrap_plots(ncol = 2, nrow = 2)

Or instead of a for loop use Reduce but I don't see any reason to so as we have wrap_plots():

p_list |> 
  Reduce(`|`, x = _) +
  plot_layout(ncol = 2, nrow = 2)