Black bar covering my x labels for matplotlib plot?

Question

I am trying to play a figure and I am having a black box pop up on the bottom of the plot where the x labels should be. I tried this command from a similar question on here in the past:

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams.update({'figure.autolayout': True})

But the problem was still the same. Here is my current code:

import pylab
from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams.update({'figure.autolayout': True})

df['date'] =  df['date'].astype('str') 

pos = np.arange(len(df['date']))
plt.bar(pos,df['value'])
ticks = plt.xticks(pos, df['value'])

And my plot is attached here. Any help would be great!

Answer 1

pos = np.arange(len(df['date'])) and ticks = plt.xticks(pos, df['value']) are causing the problem you are having. You are putting an xtick at every value you have in the data frame.

Don't know how you data looks like and what's the most sensible way to do this. ticks = plt.xticks(pos[::20], df['value'].values[::20], rotation=90) will put a tick every 20 rows that would make the plot more readable.

Answer 2

It actually is not a black bar, but rather all of your x-axis labels being crammed into too small of a space. You can try rotating the axis labels to create more space or just remove them all together.