How to adjust 'tick frequency' for string x-axis?

Question

I have a list to draw. Is there a way to display parts of x-axis labels, for example x[0], x[10], ..., but keep the figure the same?

x = [\'alice         


        

Answer 1

One way you can do this is to reduce the number of ticks on the x axis. You can set the ticks using ax.set_xticks(). Here you can slice the x list to set a ticks at every 2nd entry using the slice notation [::2]. Then set the x tick labels using ax.set_xticklabels() using the same slice when setting the ticks.

For example:

x = ["Ant", "Bob", "Crab", "Donkey", "Elephant", "Fire", "Giant","Hello",
     "Igloo", "Jump", "Kellogg","Llama", "More", "Night"]
y = np.random.randint(0,10,14)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1,2, figsize=(9,5))
ax1.plot(x,y)
ax1.set_title("Crowded x axis")

ax2.plot(x,y)
ax2.set_xticks(x[::2])
ax2.set_xticklabels(x[::2], rotation=45)
ax2.set_title("Every 2nd ticks on x axis")

plt.show()