Can't get bar chart to plot in matplotlib

Question

Using this code,

x = [420.0, 4353.0, 4373.0]; y = [269.0, 252.0, 283.0]
plt.bar(x,y)
plt.show()

I get:

Where are the bars? How do I get them to show up?

Answer 1

By default, each bar is plotted with a width of 0.8 and due to the large range of x values on your plot, that is too narrow to be visible when rendered. You'll instead want to specify a larger width using the width kwarg

plt.bar(x, y, width=20)

You an also use an array for the width value to specify a different width for each bar

plt.bar(x, y, width=[3000, 20, 20])