Plotting dates with plot_date

Question

I have a bunch of dates in the form MM / DD / YYYY. I use a parser to get them into something that looks like datetime.datetime(YYYY, MM, DD, 0, 0).

I have data corresponding to each date in an array y and would like to plot the two arrays against one another. Using matplotlib.dates.date2num I plot them as

x= matplotlib.dates.date2num(dates)

plot_date(dates,y)

When I do this, I get the following plot

enter image description here

Where as I would prefer something that looks like a time series.

How can I fix this

Deditos · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-29 13:02:33Z

2

Presumably the dates and data that you're reading in are not in time order, in which case you'll need to sort them both before they're passed to plot_date():

s = np.argsort(dates)
plot_date(dates[s],y[s])

This should work whether you sort on the list/array of datetime instances (your dates) or their numerical equivalents (your x).

answered Mar 29, 2015 at 13:02

Deditos

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