Creating a bar chart with specific labels

Question

I need to create a graph where the x axis is dates and the y axis is the frequency of a certain event on that day. My issues are plotting with plt.bar() is that as I have values for every day over 8 years, the x axis has far too many labels to be legible. How do I change it so it only shows the years rather than having labels for every day?

I've tried this

# data == dict, keys == 'yyyy-mm-dd'
plt.bar(data.keys(), data.values())
ticks = []
for key in data.keys():
    ticks.append(key[0:4]) # Gets only years. 
ticks = list(set(ticks)) # Get rid of duplicates. 
plt.xticks(ticks)
plt.show()

But the new xticks bunch together at the end on top of one another.

Remove `plt.xticks` and instead convert your strings to actual dates. — ImportanceOfBeingErnest, Oct 31 '19 at 14:26
Use plt.xticks(rotation=45) to rotate ticks and fit them. See this for help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11264521/date-ticks-and-rotation-in-matplotlib — Pritish kumar, Oct 31 '19 at 14:40
Conversion to dates changes the actual graph loads. There are far too many dates for a rotation to work — Alesi Rowland, Oct 31 '19 at 14:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 31 '19 at 17:09

0

You can specify both the ticks labels and locations. pyplot.xticks([0, 0.5, 1, 1, 1], ('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E')) results in:

And pyplot.xticks(numpy.arange(5), ('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E')):

answered Oct 31 '19 at 17:09

Francisca Concha-Ramírez

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Creating a bar chart with specific labels

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