Interval Bar Chart

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Interval Bar Chart plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/interval-bar-chart?lang=en

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggplot2

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggplot2", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggplot2")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version date (UTC) lib source
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 ggplot2    * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

The case data consists of the highest and lowest temperatures for each of the twelve months in a year, along with the corresponding abbreviated month names. Based on the case data, temperature intervals and average temperature lines have been plotted for each month.

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/interval-bar-chart/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
data$name_num <- match(data[["month"]], unique(data[["month"]]))

# View data
head(data)

  month min_temperature max_temperature mean name_num
1   Jan              15              20   16        1
2   Feb              17              25   20        2
3   Mar              20              26   23        3
4   Apr              25              30   27        4
5   May              30              35   32        5
6   Jun              32              35   34        6

Visualization

# Interval Bar Chart
p <- ggplot(data, aes(x = month, y = max_temperature)) +
  geom_rect(aes(xmin = name_num - 0.4, xmax = name_num + 0.4,
                ymin = min_temperature, ymax = max_temperature), 
            fill = "#282726", alpha = 0.7) +
  geom_line(aes(x = name_num, y = mean), color = "#006064", size = 0.8) +
  labs(x = "Month", y = "Temperature") +
  scale_x_discrete() +
  theme_bw()

p