How To Force Set X Ticks On Matplotlib, Or Set Datetime Type With No Year

So I have a function that will take a pandas dataframe and plot it, along with displaying some error metrics, and I also have a function that will take a pandas dataframe with a da

Solution 1:

You can set the ticks used for the x axis via ax.set_xticks() and labels via ax.set_xticklabels().

For instance you could just provide that method with a list of dates to use, such as every 20th value of the current pd.DataFrame index (df.index[::20]) and then set the formatting of the date string as below.

# Get the current axis
ax = plt.gca()

# Only label every 20th value
ticks_to_use = df.index[::20]

# Set format of labels (note year not excluded as requested)
labels = [ i.strftime("%-H:%M") for i in ticks_to_use ]

# Now set the ticks and labels
ax.set_xticks(ticks_to_use)
ax.set_xticklabels(labels)

Notes

If labels still overlap, you could also rotate the them by passing the rotatation argument (e.g. ax.set_xticklabels(labels, rotation=45)).

There is a useful reference for time string formats here: http://strftime.org.

Solution 2:

I faced similar issue with my plot

Matplotlib automatically handles timestamps on axes, but only when they are in timestamp format. Timestamps in index were in string format, so I changed read_csv to

pd.read_csv(file_path, index_col=[0], parse_dates=True)

Try changing the index to timestamp format. This solved the problem for me hope it does the same for you.