Is there a way of displaying text in a matplotlib graph axis?

Question

I'm trying to plot some data into a chart, I'd like for the 'Months' axis to have 'January', 'Feburuary' etc. instead of integers. However if I enter text for this parameter, I get the following error:

NameError: name 'Months' is not defined

Here's my code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Months = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
position = [0, 100, 200, 300, 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2]

plt.plot(Months, position)
plt.xlabel('Time (hr)')
plt.ylabel('Position (km)')

Is there a way of putting static text in here instead of integers?

Red · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-15 21:01:37Z

3

Just need to write strings in your list instead of integers:

Months = ["January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"]

You can also add the following line to display it in a more user-friendly way.

plt.xticks(rotation=90)

edited Jan 15, 2021 at 21:01

Red

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answered Jan 15, 2021 at 20:53

Louis Rassinfosse

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2 Comments

Harry Stanford Over a year ago

That's embarrassing that I missed that lmao, thank you so much man!! Got any other cool functions to make the chart look nicer and clearer?

Louis Rassinfosse Over a year ago

Uhm .. actually, you can do more or less anything you'd like... Enlarge the ticks, the labels, add a nice descriptive title... Maybe you can try to add a grid (alpha is the transparancy of the grid: plt.grid(alpha=0.2)

Red · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-15 21:00:02Z

You can use the datetime module:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from datetime import datetime

Months = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
position = [0, 100, 200, 300, 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2]

Months = [datetime.strptime(str(n), "%m").strftime("%B") for n in Months]

plt.plot(Months, position)
plt.xlabel('Time (hr)')
plt.ylabel('Position (km)')

plt.show()

Output:

If you want the months to be abbreviated, use the format %b instead of %B:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from datetime import datetime

Months = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
position = [0, 100, 200, 300, 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2]

Months = [datetime.strptime(str(n), "%m").strftime("%B") for n in Months]

plt.plot(Months, position)
plt.xlabel('Time (hr)')
plt.ylabel('Position (km)')

plt.show()

Output:

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