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I have a pandas Series with two columns, Index (of timestamps) and floats

screenshot of Series

which I try to plot using Matplotlib as follows

s2.plot()

which gives me the following plot

enter image description here

now I want to format the x-axis to just show the timestamp in '%Y-%m-%d' format so I try 

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
xdfmt = dates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m-%d')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(xdfmt)
ax.xaxis_date()
s2.plot()

which fails as follows

dt = datetime.datetime.fromordinal(ix).replace(tzinfo=UTC)

ValueError: ordinal must be >= 1

How should I format the x-axis to display legible x-axis labels?

Improve this question
7
  • You need to use plot_date(). docs Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 19:48
  • If you want to format dates, the data needs to be dates first, not strings. Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 19:48
  • 1
    Also, rather than the screenshot, it is always a good idea to show/paste the data so that one can copy and reproduce the results that you are getting. See here for more details. Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 19:50
  • 1
    @HarvIpan matplotlib's plot_date is essentially the same as matplotlib's plot if the input are datetime objects. Here the OP uses the plot method of pandas, which is a bit different. There are however enough questions around showing how to plot dates with either pandas or matplotlib. Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 19:52
  • You are right. @ImportanceOfBeingErnest. I jumped the guns to comment, I guess. Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 19:55
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