Box( ) function in R programming is used to draw a box around the current plot in the given color and line type. The function box( ) is built under ‘graphics’ package of R programming. The bty argument of the plotting function determines the type of box drawn.
Syntax: box(which = “plot”, lty = “solid”, …)
Parameters:
- which: character, one of “plot”, “figure”, “inner” and “outer”.
- lty: line type of the box.
Example 1:
We will plot a curve without axes i.e. ‘axes = FALSE’ in order to avoid default boxes and then add a red box to the plot. We will plot a curve of tan(x).
# Plotting curve # without axes curve(tan, -20, 20, axes = FALSE)
# Using box() to draw # a Red box around # the curve box(which = "plot",col = 6, lty = "solid")
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Output :
Plot without axes
Plot enclosed in a box.
Types of boxes :
The default box around the base R plots can be customized using ‘bty’ argument of the corresponding function. Boxes specified under the argument can be of types :
- Full box – bty = “o” (Default)
- Left and bottom – bty = “L”
- Top, left and bottom – bty = “C”
- Top and right – bty = “7”
- Top, right and bottom – bty = “]”
- Left, bottom and right – bty = “U”
- No box – bty = “n”
Example 2:
We will start with plotting a statistical plot of type line and dot and then well will try to add different types of boxes using ‘bty’ argument.
# plotting a line curve # using plot( ) function. plot(1:10, abs(stats::rnorm(10)),
type = "b", axes = FALSE)
# adding axes and labels # to the plot axis(1, at = 1:10, labels = letters[1:10])
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Output :
Now we will add a box having only left and bottom rules using bty=”L” argument.
box(which="plot",lty = 'solid', col = 'blue',bty="L")
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Output :
Now we will add a box having a top, right, and bottom rules using bty=”]” argument.
box(which="plot",lty = 'solid', col = 'blue',bty="]")
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Output :