Changing x-axis labels in errorbar plot: no attribute 'get_xticklabels'

Question

I am trying to plot some data the main plot information is

ax1 = plt.errorbar(df1.index, df1['Mean'],
               yerr=df1['SD'], color='black', linestyle='-')
ax2 = plt.errorbar(df2.index, df2['Mean'],
               yerr=df2['SD'], color='grey', linestyle='-')

The problem is each data frame index is 5% increments of a whole (ie df1 index is 0,5,10...100 as is df2) the result is the plot is trying to cram 40 labels on the x-axis

I have tried a few different approaches but none have worked so far. For example trying to rotate the labels and reduce font size, eg:

plt.setp(ax1.get_xticklabels(), rotation='vertical', fontsize=7)

returns

AttributeError: 'ErrorbarContainer' object has no attribute 'get_xticklabels'

I get the same error if I try to alter the x axis of ax1 and ax2 using tick_params

I think it may be because the plot is seeing the x-axis as categorical but I'm stumped on how to fix it?

Ideally I would like to just show the 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100% labels for ax1 and ax2, but at this point I'd be happy with just rotating them so they look better.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are using the handle of the plot (of errorbar ) and not the handle of the axis. There are two ways to get the handle of the axis:

1. When creating the figure (or axis in fact).
2. At any time you can get the handle of the current axis using plt.gca() .

An example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.errorbar([0,1,2], [0,1,2], yerr=[.01,.05,.1])
ax.errorbar([0,1,2], [0,2,4], yerr=[.01,.05,.1])

plt.setp(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation='vertical', fontsize=7)

plt.show()

This would result in:

If you want the use the handle of the current axis you could also have used:

plt.setp(plt.gca().get_xticklabels(), rotation='vertical', fontsize=7)