Formatting x axis with per day frequency

Question

I am trying get daily data plot. I have 3 months of data and its really hard to point out each day. How can I format x axis, so that I can get every date?

Answer 1

Changing the frequency of the major ticks can be done using set_major_locator(mdates.DayLocator(interval=5)) as shown in the example below.

Printing the date for every day for 3 months worth of data results in a very crowded x-axis. So might be worth setting the major ticks like every 5 days and then minor ticks every day, as in the example below.

Also I would suggest having a look at this example from matplotlib and this question which is very similar.

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

from datetime import datetime

# Just creating some random data
x = []
day = 1
month = 5
for ix in range(90):
    try:
        x.append(datetime(2000, month, day))
        day +=1
    except ValueError:
        day = 1
        month += 1
y = np.random.uniform(0, 10, len(x))

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(mdates.DayLocator(interval=1))
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.DayLocator(interval=5))
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d'))

ax.plot(x, y)
fig.autofmt_xdate()

ax.grid(True)

plt.show()

which will give a plot like this (the data will different since its random), minor ticks every day, and major ticks with a label every 5 days.