Date tick control in pylab/matplotlib

18 May, 2009 - 14:05

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Today I struggled a bit with pylab's plot_date function and overlapping date tick labels:

overlapping plot_date xticks

After some googling, I found that pylab offers nice flexible date tick control and formatting. I added a date tick locator and a date formatter to the mix as follows:

import pylab
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.dates
 
fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.gca()
 
# Plotting stuff here ...
ax.plot_date(dates, values, 'b.-')
 
# Set major x ticks on Mondays.
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(
    matplotlib.dates.WeekdayLocator(byweekday=matplotlib.dates.MO)
)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(
    matplotlib.dates.DateFormatter('%a %d\n%b %Y')
)

and now I have this plot:

nicely formatted date ticks

Nice.

27 March, 2011 - 22:25

Thanks. I used this. It saved

Anonymous (not verified)

Thanks. I used this. It saved me at least 15 minutes.

11 January, 2010 - 23:19

Thanks So much for share this

bruststraffung (not verified)

Thanks So much for share this information, i was needing this code to add my locator, because im not than skilful to realice by myself.
bruststraffung

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