How do I change the range of the x-axis with datetimes in matplotlib?

Question

I\'m trying to plot a graph of dates on the x-axis and values on the y-axis. It works fine, except that I can\'t get the range of the x-axis to be appropriate. The x-axis ra

Answer 1

Edit:

Having seen actual data from the OP, all of the values are at the same date/time. So matplotlib is automatically zooming the x-axis out. You can still manually set the x-axis limits with datetime objects

---

If I do something like this on matplotlib v1.3.1:

import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [datetime.date(2014, 1, 29)] * 3 
y = [2, 4, 1]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot_date(x, y, markerfacecolor='CornflowerBlue', markeredgecolor='white')
fig.autofmt_xdate()
ax.set_xlim([datetime.date(2014, 1, 26), datetime.date(2014, 2, 1)])
ax.set_ylim([0, 5])

I get:

And the axes limits match the dates that I specified.