Creating a graph with date and time in axis labels with Matplotlib

To create a graph with date and time in axis labels, we can take the following steps−

• Create a figure and add a set of subplots.
• Create x and y data points using numpy.
• Set date formatter for X-axis.
• Plot x and y using plot() method.
• Set the ticks of X-axis.
• Set the date-time tick labels for X-axis, with some rotation.
• Make the plot tight layout using plt.tight_layout() method.
• To display the figure, use show() method.

Example

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt, dates
import datetime
import numpy as np
plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = [7.00, 3.50]
plt.rcParams["figure.autolayout"] = True
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
x = np.array([datetime.datetime(2021, 1, 1, i, 0) for i in range(5)])
y = np.random.randint(5, size=x.shape)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(dates.DateFormatter('%m-%d %H:%M'))
plt.plot(x, y)
ax.set_xticks(x)
ax.set_xticklabels(x, rotation=30, fontdict={'horizontalalignment': 'center'})
plt.show()

Output

Rishikesh Kumar Rishi

Published on 06-May-2021 13:17:27

• Related Questions & Answers
• Drawing a network graph with networkX and Matplotlib
• How to show date and time on the X-axis in Matplotlib?
• How to change the separation between tick labels and axis labels in Matplotlib?
• Creating a Heatmap in matplotlib with pcolor
• How to hide axes but keep axis-labels in 3D Plot with Matplotlib?
• Hide axis values but keep axis tick labels in matplotlib
• Barchart with vertical labels in Python/Matplotlib
• Tweaking axis labels and names orientation for 3D plots in Matplotlib
• Create ggplot2 graph with darker axes labels, lines and titles in R
• Create ggplot2 graph with reversed Y-axis and X-axis on top in R.
• Change values on matplotlib imshow() graph axis
• Show tick labels when sharing an axis in Matplotlib
• Increasing the space for X-axis labels in Matplotlib
• Creating a Graph in Javascript
• Creating curved edges with NetworkX in Python3 (Matplotlib)