Accessing axes label strings in matplotlib

Question

I am trying to access the axis label strings for my plot in matplotlib so that I can then create a new set of them. However, whenever I try to get them with axes.get_xticklabels(), I only get an empty string in return. I read that the labels are only populated after a draw() method is called, but calling pyplot.draw() does nothing here.

ax=0
for i in yvar:
    hist00, ext00, asp00 = histogram(np.log10(df[spn[xvar]]), np.log10(df[spn[i]]), 100, False)
    axes[ax].imshow(hist00, norm = matplotlib.colors.LogNorm(), extent = ext00, aspect = asp00) 
# This first part of the code just has to do with my custom plot, so I don't think it should affect the problem.

    plt.draw() # Calling this to attempt to populate the labels.
    
    for item in axes[ax].get_xticklabels():
        print(item.get_text()) # Printing out each label as a test
    
    ax +=1 # The axes thing is for my multi-plot figure.

The labels show up normally when I show() the plot, or when I save it. But the code above only prints empty strings. I also tried to access the labels after the loop, but it still didn't work.

The weirdest part of this is that if I remove the looping part and put in i = 0, then it works if I paste it into python interactive terminal line by line, but not if I run the script... This part is confusing but not as important.

What is the problem with my code? Is there something else I need to do for this?

This is a follow-on from my previous question, which didn't get much traction. Hopefully this is more approachable.

Answer 1

This seems to do what you need:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig = plt.figure()
ax = plt.axes([0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.8])
ax.plot(np.random.random(100), '.')

fig.canvas.draw() # <---- This is the line you need

print(ax.get_xticklabels())
# [Text(-20.0, 0, '-20'), Text(0.0, 0, '0'), Text(20.0, 0, '20'), Text(40.0, 0, '40'), Text(60.0, 0, '60'), Text(80.0, 0, '80'), Text(100.0, 0, '100'), Text(120.0, 0, '120')]