Date ticks and rotation in matplotlib

Solution 1:

If you prefer a non-object-oriented approach, move plt.xticks(rotation=70) to right before the two avail_plot calls, eg

plt.xticks(rotation=70)
avail_plot(axs[0], dates, s1, 'testing', 'green')
avail_plot(axs[1], dates, s1, 'testing2', 'red')

This sets the rotation property before setting up the labels. Since you have two axes here, plt.xticks gets confused after you've made the two plots. At the point when plt.xticks doesn't do anything, plt.gca() does not give you the axes you want to modify, and so plt.xticks, which acts on the current axes, is not going to work.

For an object-oriented approach not using plt.xticks, you can use

plt.setp( axs[1].xaxis.get_majorticklabels(), rotation=70 )

after the two avail_plot calls. This sets the rotation on the correct axes specifically.

Solution 2:

Solution works for matplotlib 2.1+

There exists an axes method tick_params that can change tick properties. It also exists as an axis method as set_tick_params

ax.tick_params(axis='x', rotation=45)

Or

ax.xaxis.set_tick_params(rotation=45)

As a side note, the current solution mixes the stateful interface (using pyplot) with the object-oriented interface by using the command plt.xticks(rotation=70). Since the code in the question uses the object-oriented approach, it's best to stick to that approach throughout. The solution does give a good explicit solution with plt.setp( axs[1].xaxis.get_majorticklabels(), rotation=70 )

Solution 3:

An easy solution which avoids looping over the ticklabes is to just use

fig.autofmt_xdate()

This command automatically rotates the xaxis labels and adjusts their position. The default values are a rotation angle 30° and horizontal alignment "right". But they can be changed in the function call

fig.autofmt_xdate(bottom=0.2, rotation=30, ha='right')

The additional bottom argument is equivalent to setting plt.subplots_adjust(bottom=bottom), which allows to set the bottom axes padding to a larger value to host the rotated ticklabels.

So basically here you have all the settings you need to have a nice date axis in a single command.

A good example can be found on the matplotlib page.