简化matplotlib轴中的科学记数法/偏移量

Question

I am trying to draw a plot with large data using matplotlib. matplotlib simplifies the numbers on the y-axis which is expected. However, there are too many useless leading zeros that I can not find a way to remove.

Here's a reproducible example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
y = [i for i in range(10400000000000000, 10400750000000000,500000000000)]
x = [i for i in range(len(y))]
plt.plot(x,y)
plt.show()

What I get looks like this:

I know how to disable useOffset but I want the top of the y-axis to keep the scientific notation and just say 1e11+1.04e16 instead of 1e11+1.0400000000e16 . Any ideas on how to solve this?

Answer 1

For this you can easily do that by matplotlib.ticker module. All you have to do is add this code snippet to your code,

import matplotlib.ticker as ticker

fig, ax = plt.subplots
ax.plot(x, y)
# Initializing the formatter
formatter = ticker.ScalarFormatter(useMathText = True)
formatter.set_scientific(True)
formatter.set_powerlimits((-1, 1))
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)

# And finally plotting our graph
plt.show()

This code will produce the result in scientific form. That is it will show x10^11+1.04*10^16

And if you are specific with your desired output try the code below,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

y = [i for i in range(10400000000000000, 10400750000000000,500000000000)]
x = [i for i in range(len(y))]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)

ax.annotate("1e11+1.04e16", (x[-1], y[-1]), xytext=(x[-1]-100, y[-1]+1000000000), arrowprops=dict(facecolor='red', shrink=0.05))

plt.show()

The second code uses annotate method. So the arguments to be passed are the text to be displayed in the desired format and the second argument specifies the x and y coordinates. Hope this helps!