Emulate ggplot2 default color palette

Question

What function can I use to emulate ggplot2\'s default color palette for a desired number of colors. For example, an input of 3 would produce a character vector of HEX color

Answer 1

From page 106 of the ggplot2 book by Hadley Wickham:

The default colour scheme, scale_colour_hue picks evenly spaced hues around the hcl colour wheel.

With a bit of reverse engineering you can construct this function:

ggplotColours <- function(n = 6, h = c(0, 360) + 15){
  if ((diff(h) %% 360) < 1) h[2] <- h[2] - 360/n
  hcl(h = (seq(h[1], h[2], length = n)), c = 100, l = 65)
}

Demonstrating this in barplot:

y <- 1:3
barplot(y, col = ggplotColours(n = 3))