How to Draw a Legend to Base R Graph (Example Code)

In this R post you’ll learn how to apply the legend function.

Creating Example Data

data(iris)                         # Iris data set as example data
head(iris)                         # Print head of iris data set
#   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
# 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
# 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
# 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

Example: Drawing Legend to a Plot in Base R

plot(x = iris$Sepal.Length,        # Draw plot
     y = iris$Sepal.Width,
     col = iris$Species)
legend("topright",                 # Add legend
       legend = levels(iris$Species),
       col = 1:3,
       pch = 1)

r graph figure 1 draw legend base r graph programming language

Further Resources & Related Articles

Please find some additional R programming tutorials on topics such as lines, text elements, and plot legends in the following list:

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