Adjusting xaxis in plot.xts - r

Question

I want to zoom into the chart. The chart from the code below use data from 2007 to 2019. I will like to look at the chart only from 2012 to 2015. Does anyone know how to do this?
I have tried with xlim = ("2012-01-01";"2015-01-01"), but that did not work.
library(quantmod)
getSymbols("AAPL")
plot.xts(AAPL[,6])

Answer 1

You have just to subset your xts-object to zoom it:
xts_data <- AAPL[ , 6]
xts_zoom <- xts_data['2012/2015']
plot.xts(xts_zoom)
The reason why setting xlim manually does not work is that the xlim values are calculated inside the plot.xts() itself. See, for example, the rows 123-134 of the plot.xts() source code:
if (cs$Env$observation.based) {
cs$Env$xycoords <- xy.coords(1:NROW(cs$Env$xdata[subset]))
cs$set_xlim(c(1, NROW(cs$Env$xdata[subset])))
cs$Env$xstep <- 1
}
else {
xycoords <- xy.coords(.index(cs$Env$xdata[cs$Env$xsubset]),
cs$Env$xdata[cs$Env$xsubset][, 1])
cs$Env$xycoords <- xycoords
cs$Env$xlim <- range(xycoords$x, na.rm = TRUE)
...
}
Another option is to use the built-in zoom tools of the quantmod package itself:
chartSeries(xts_data)
zoomChart('2012/2015')