Time series plot in R skips dates on x-axis

Question

I'm trying to create a simple time series plot in R with the following data (it's in tbl format):

    Date          sales
  <date>        <dbl>
1 2010-02-05 1105572.
2 2010-09-03 1048761.
3 2010-11-19 1002791.
4 2010-12-24 1798476.
5 2011-02-04 1025625.
6 2011-11-18 1031977.

When I use the following command: plot(by_date$Date, by_date$sales, type = 'l') , the resulting graph just skips the individual dates, as I want it to display, and just shows the year on the x-axis, like this (please ignore the axis labels for now):

I've checked the format of the date column using class(by_date$Date) and it does show up as 'Date'. I've also checked other threads here and the closest one that came to answering my query is the one here . Tried that approach but didn't work for me, while plotting in ggplot or converting data to data frame didn't work either. Please help, thanks.

Answer 1

With ggplot this should work -

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(by_date, aes(Date, sales)) + geom_line()

You can use scale_x_date to format your x-axis as you want.