Using matplotlib, make date ticks not overlap

Question

I have dates for tick marks on my x-axis. How can I make them automatically not overlap?

There are a lot of S.O. questions and posts about setting the tick interval - but this won't work for me since the date range for my plot can vary from 1 week, up to 1 year.

When people have plots with highly variable ranges, what is the method to make the x-axis ticks automatically not overlap?

plt.plot(date_list, unique_list)
plt.ylabel('# Uniques per day')

enter image description here

The easiest workaround is to rotate the tick labels. Have a look at fig.autofmt_xdate(), or you can manually set the rotation for the tick labels. — Joe Kington
– Joe Kington, Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 19:44

MaxNoe · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-23 15:03:17Z

15

You could rotate the xticks by 90 degrees (or any other value):

plt.xticks(rotation=90)

maybe you need to call tight_layout() if the ticks are then out of the frame

plt.tight_layout()

edited Jul 23, 2014 at 15:03

answered Jul 23, 2014 at 10:59

MaxNoe

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PaulDong · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-21 05:37:15Z

1

Don't have enough rep to comment, because I don't think the tip I am offering could solve this problem, but I had exactly the same issue.

My solution is to make the plot itself flatter, by plt.figure(figsize = (20,6)).

My reasoning is as such, there are only so many pixels and if changing the date format and rotation as suggested by others is not an option, maybe stretch the plot a bit?

answered Sep 21, 2015 at 5:37

PaulDong

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