plot time of day vs date in matplotlib

Question

I want to plot, in a specific few ways, dates on the x axis and time of day on the y axis, and then have either line plots or interval (floating bar) plots.

This S

Answer 1

Follow Joe Kingston's response, but I'd add that you need to convert your date strings into datetime objects, which can easily be done with the datetime module, and then convert them to matplotlib dates represented as floats (which can then be formatted as desired).

import datetime as dt
import matplotlib as mpl

some_time_str = '2010-12-20 05:00:00'
some_time_dt = dt.datetime.strptime(some_time_str, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
some_time_num = mpl.dates.date2num(some_time_dt) # 734126.20833333337

If you start with an array filled with time strings, you can do something like:

time_str_list = ['2010-12-20 05:00:00','2010-12-20 05:30:00']
time_num_list = map(
    lambda x: mpl.dates.date2num(dt.datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')),
    time_str_list) #[734126.20833333337, 734126.22916666663]