Accessing Matplotlib Text Object Label Text

Question

Attempting to access the length of a matplotlib axis label with this code:

    for label in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()[1::2]:
        print(len(label))

However I am getting an error that the object does not have a length attribute. print(label[2]) also errors out with a similar error.

Answer 1

Matplotlib's text objects can't be accessed through standard indexing - what you're looking for is the get_text() attribute found in the text object documentation . Eg

for label in ax.xaxis.get_tick_labels()[1::2]:
    print(len(label.get_text()))

Answer 2

The label s you are iterating over from get_ticklabels() are matplotlib.text.Text objects. To access the actual text in that object, you can use get_text() .

So, something like this should work:

for label in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()[1::2]:
    print(len(label.get_text()))

Note that this length may include special characters (eg latex $ mathmode delimiters) as it is the length of the raw text string