Matplotlib fix y-axis

Question

I am trying to create a horizontal bar chart with matplotlib. My data points are the following two arrays

distance = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 3000]
value = [10, 15, 50, 74, 95, 98]

my code to generate the horizontal bar chart is as follows

plt.barh(distance, value, height=75)
plt.savefig(fig_name, dpi=300)
plt.close()

The problem is my image comes out like this

https://i.stack.imgur.com/C2zGn.jpg

Is there a way to ensure all blocks are the same width and to skip the spaces in between 500 and 300

how weird, in Python 2.7 it looks like this using your code: https://imgur.com/4o1mVxM. Broken axes are kind of a pain, e.g. [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32185411/break-in-x-axis-of-matplotlib) question/answer — a11, Apr 08 '19 at 21:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '19 at 22:33

You can do this making sure Matplotlib treats your labels like labels, not like numbers. You can do this by converting them to strings:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

distance = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 3000]
value = [10, 15, 50, 74, 95, 98]
distance = [str(number) for number in distance]
plt.barh(distance, value, height=0.75)

Note that you have to change the height.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '19 at 13:45

Alternatively, you can use a range of numbers as y-values, using range() function, to position the horizontal bars and then set the tick-labels as desired using plt.yticks() function whose first argument is the positions of the ticks and the second argument is the tick-labels.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

distance = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 3000]
value = [10, 15, 50, 74, 95, 98]
plt.barh(range(len(distance)), value, height=0.6)
plt.yticks(range(len(distance)), distance)
plt.show()

Matplotlib fix y-axis

2 Answers2