Year on x-axis is pinned to January on Matplotlib

Question

I have a dataframe as follows. | Date| A | B | |-- | ---- | -- | | Jan-20| 205.0| 232.0 | Feb-20| 328.0 | 338.0

I turn the Date column into a datetime object, set it as the index and graph it.

df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'],format="%b-%y") 
df = df.set_index("Date")
df.plot(kind='line', figsize=(10,5), color=["#FDCE0D","#3A424A"])

However I get the following x-axis where the year is under each instance of January.

Is there a way to have the year go next to each month, such as 'Jan 2018'? I know I can perform a .strftime("%b %Y) but I want to keep it as a datetime object as I'm overlaying shading to the graph using datetime ranges.

When I try to format it the following way I get this.

date_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%b %Y')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(date_fmt)

Sasha Halpern · Answer 1 · 2021-09-28T14:58:34.033

0

If you assign your plot to a variable (ax), you can do the following.

import matplotlib.dates as mdates

ax.set_xticks(df.index)
date_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%b %Y')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(date_fmt)

edited Sep 28 '21 at 14:58

answered Sep 28 '21 at 14:20

Sasha Halpern

93
1
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Unfortunately, that doesn't work, it messes up the dates by setting it to 1971. It's also strange that I have July 1971 twice now. – fent00 Sep 28 '21 at 14:29
Try adding ax.set_xticks(df.index) before the code above. – Sasha Halpern Sep 28 '21 at 14:58
Just noticed this question was closed. The link provided has a very comprehensive answer. – Sasha Halpern Sep 28 '21 at 15:00

Year on x-axis is pinned to January on Matplotlib

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