I have a date array
date_array = array(['September 11, 2012', 'September 5, 2012'])
I want to graph this date_array against a
value, value_array =array([25,28])
using matplotlib
So I want to convert the date_array to a number like
date_as_number=array([20120812, 20120805])
so that I could plot the date_as_number as any other number against the value_array.
To Parse Dates
from dateutil.parser import parse
date_array = np.array(['September 11, 2012', 'September 5, 2012'])
[parse(x).date() for x in date_array]
Output:
[datetime.date(2012, 9, 11), datetime.date(2012, 9, 5)]
Set the date column as index and use the pandas builtin plot to get the date wise plot that you need. Below is an example
import random
import pandas as pd
data = [('September {}, 2012'.format(i),random.random()) for i in range(1,30)]
data_df = pd.DataFrame(data,columns=['_date','value'])
data_df['_date'] = pd.to_datetime(data_df._date)
data_df= data_df.set_index('_date')
data_df.head()
This gives a dataframe like this
value
_date
2012-09-01 0.379791
2012-09-02 0.146355
2012-09-03 0.545267
2012-09-04 0.398388
2012-09-05 0.926643
Just plot this df.
data_df.plot()
