title: Plot emojis/emoticons in R with ggplot
body: <p>I'm trying to make a plot with emojis in ggplot2. What I want is to show emojis instead of labels or show like geom. <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40355540/how-to-show-2-emojis-when-using-the-geom-emoji-function-related-to-ggplot">This question</a> in Stack is very similar to my problem, but it does not solve it either, the answer is quite manual and I need to make automatic (my real data frame has 3000 rows).</p>
  
  <p>Just to clarify in this plot below I want to show emojis instead of text labels or within the bars. But seems impossible.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/HYZZ1.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/HYZZ1.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>After trying differents solutions I'm stacked so any help would be appreciated. I read different ways to face the problem like <a href="https://github.com/dill/emoGG/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, <a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/emojis-in-ggplot-graphics.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, <a href="http://opiateforthemass.es/articles/emoticons-in-R/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. </p>
  
  <p>My last try was like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>mult_format &lt;- function() {
    function(x) emo::ji(x)
  }
  ggplot(foo, aes(name_emoji, n)) + 
    geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
    coord_flip() +
    scale_y_continuous(labels = mult_format())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it doesn't work.</p>
  
  <p>My data looks like this, name_emoji cames from <a href="https://github.com/hadley/emo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">emo package</a>, and I also can change it to byte:</p>
  
  <pre><code>               name_emoji     n        emoji
                      &lt;chr&gt; &lt;int&gt;        &lt;chr&gt;
   1            closed book     1 "\U0001f4d5"
   2          confused face     7 "\U0001f615"
   3                  dizzy     20 "\U0001f4ab"
   4 face with tears of joy     1 "\U0001f602"
   5          flexed biceps     1 "\U0001f4aa"
   6             light bulb     1 "\U0001f4a1"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here to reproduce:</p>
  
  <pre><code>structure(list(name_emoji = c("closed book", "confused face", 
  "dizzy", "face with tears of joy", "flexed biceps", "light bulb"
  ), n = c(1L, 7L, 20L, 1L, 1L, 1L), emoji = c("\U0001f4d5", "\U0001f615", 
  "\U0001f4ab", "\U0001f602", "\U0001f4aa", "\U0001f4a1")), .Names = c("name_emoji", 
  "n", "emoji"), row.names = c(NA, -6L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", 
  "data.frame"))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance! (I'm about to hate emoticons :) )</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit with output following answer by J_F and sessionInfo</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>foo$name_emoji &lt;- as.factor(foo$name_emoji)
  foo$emoji &lt;- as.factor(foo$emoji)
  
  ggplot(foo, aes(name_emoji, n)) + 
    geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
    scale_x_discrete(breaks = foo$name_emoji, labels = foo$emoji) +
    coord_flip()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/C9WrO.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/C9WrO.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>This is my session:</p>
  
  <pre><code>R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30)
  Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
  Running under: macOS High Sierra 10.13.1
  
  Matrix products: default
  BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
  LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
  
  locale:
  [1] es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8/C/es_ES.UTF-8/es_ES.UTF-8
  
  attached base packages:
  [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets 
  [6] methods   base     
  
  other attached packages:
   [1] emo_0.0.0.9000     emojifont_0.5.1   
   [3] DataCombine_0.2.21 forcats_0.2.0     
   [5] stringr_1.2.0      dplyr_0.7.4       
   [7] purrr_0.2.4        readr_1.1.1       
   [9] tidyr_0.7.2        tibble_1.3.4      
  [11] ggplot2_2.2.1      tidyverse_1.2.1   
  
  loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
   [1] Rcpp_0.12.14        lubridate_1.7.1    
   [3] lattice_0.20-35     twitteR_1.1.9      
   [5] sysfonts_0.7.1      assertthat_0.2.0   
   [7] digest_0.6.12       psych_1.7.8        
   [9] mime_0.5            R6_2.2.2           
  [11] cellranger_1.1.0    plyr_1.8.4         
  [13] httr_1.3.1          rlang_0.1.4        
  [15] lazyeval_0.2.1      readxl_1.0.0       
  [17] rstudioapi_0.7      data.table_1.10.4-3
  [19] miniUI_0.1.1        proto_1.0.0        
  [21] labeling_0.3        foreign_0.8-69     
  [23] bit_1.1-12          munsell_0.4.3      
  [25] shiny_1.0.5         broom_0.4.3        
  [27] compiler_3.4.3      httpuv_1.3.5       
  [29] modelr_0.1.1        pkgconfig_2.0.1    
  [31] mnormt_1.5-5        htmltools_0.3.6    
  [33] crayon_1.3.4        showtextdb_2.0     
  [35] grid_3.4.3          xtable_1.8-2       
  [37] nlme_3.1-131        jsonlite_1.5       
  [39] gtable_0.2.0        DBI_0.7            
  [41] magrittr_1.5        scales_0.5.0       
  [43] cli_1.0.0           stringi_1.1.6      
  [45] reshape2_1.4.2      bindrcpp_0.2       
  [47] xml2_1.1.1          rjson_0.2.15       
  [49] tools_3.4.3         showtext_0.5       
  [51] bit64_0.9-7         glue_1.2.0         
  [53] hms_0.4.0           parallel_3.4.3     
  [55] yaml_2.1.15         colorspace_1.3-2   
  [57] rvest_0.3.2         bindr_0.1          
  [59] haven_1.1.0  
  </code></pre>