How to determine the order of bars in a matplotlib bar chart

Question

Suppose we read some data into a pandas data frame:

data1 = pd.read_csv(\"data.csv\", \"\\t\")

The content looks like this:

Answer 1

If you directly read the key as the index with

In [12]: df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', '\t', index_col='key')

In [13]: df
Out[13]: 
     val
key     
A    0.1
B    0.4
C    0.3
D    0.5
E    0.2

you can use ix to get the index in a different order and plot it using df.plot:

In [14]: df.ix[list('CADFEB')].plot(kind='barh')
Out[14]: 

(Note that F is not given in the data, but you gave it as an example)