plot.window: need finite 'ylim' values

Dear R users,

I have already asked this in r-sig-finance (not getting a solution)
but it seems to be plot-related anyway.

I like to plot several financial charts to files with an identical
layout according to "indicators" so the charts can be browsed
quickly.

quantmod::chart_Series is a function to plot a financially-related
chart in the upper part and zero or more indicators below. Normally
these indicators would be assigned defined values at least in some
part of the subset/window to be plotted, which is fine for plot. But
if all observations are NA chart_Series throws

Error in plot.window(c(1, 31), c(NaN, NaN)) : need finite 'ylim' values

While this outcome for plot/plot.window may be intended for most
applications it is undesirable here. Getting a blank subwindow here is
intended if the indicator is completely NA (at least in the subset to
be plotted).

This post
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-finance/2020q3/015000.html
suggests to generate the plot object with chart_Series and then to
explicitly set x$Env$ylim[[4]] before plotting - without success.

Can I tell plot/plot.window to ignore such errors and simply generate
an empty region instead?

Thanks
Mike


My minimal reproducible:

library(quantmod)

my_plot_function <- function () {
  data (sample_matrix)
  sample.xts <- as.xts (sample_matrix[1:50,'Close'], dateFormat="POSIXct")
  sample.xts <- cbind (sample.xts, NA)
  sample.xts[50,2] <- 0
  colnames (sample.xts) <- c('Close', 'Indicator')

  # Indicator
  ta <- list ("add_TA(sample.xts[,2])")

  # In the range to be plotted ta is completely NA
  subset <- '2007-01-10::2007-01-30'

  plot (chart_Series (sample.xts[,1], subset=subset, TA=ta))
}

my_plot_function ()

Try this:

plot (chart_Series (sample.xts[,1], subset=subset, TA=ta),
 type="n",ylim=c(minimum,maximum))

where minimum and maximum are the extremes of the plot if there were
any valid values.

Hi Jim,

on 21.08. you wrote:

Try this:

plot (chart_Series (sample.xts[,1], subset=subset, TA=ta),
 type="n",ylim=c(minimum,maximum))

where minimum and maximum are the extremes of the plot if there were
any valid values.

I've set
minimum <- 0
maximum <- 1

The error persists.

But besides that, passing 'type="n"' to plot would only make sense
when called once an I know there are only NAs to plot. Since I want to
generate many charts in a loop I would have to check for plotable data
first to decide if 'type="n"' should be passed.

As a workaround for now I do something similar. I check if the range
to be plotted is completely NA. If so I manipulate one of those
observations (which can only be 0, 1 or NA) to an "illegal" value of
0.5.

Mike