How to change the datetime tick label frequency for Matplotlib plots?

To change the datetime tick label frequency for Matplotlib plots, we can create a dataframe and plot them in some date range

Steps

Set the figure size and adjust the padding between and around the subplots.
To make potentially heterogeneous tabular data, use Pandas dataframe.
Plot the dataframe using plot() method.
Set X-axis major locator, i.e., ticks.
Set X-axis major formatter, i.e., tick labels.
Use autofmt_xdate(). Date ticklabels often overlap, so it is useful to rotate them and right align them.
To display the figure, use show() method.

Example

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates

plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = [7.50, 3.50]
plt.rcParams["figure.autolayout"] = True

index = pd.date_range(start="2020-07-01", end="2021-01-01", freq="D")
index = [pd.to_datetime(date, format='%Y-%m-%d').date() for date in index]

data = np.random.randint(1, 100, size=len(index))

df = pd.DataFrame(data=data, index=index, columns=['data'])

ax = df.plot()
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.MonthLocator(interval=1))
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%d-%m-%Y'))

plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()

plt.show()

Output

Rishikesh Kumar Rishi

Updated on: 2021-06-17T11:34:41+05:30

6K+ Views

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