Change frequency of x-axis tick label of datetime data in python bar chart using matplotlib

Question

I have a script that takes multiple .csv files and outputs multiple bar plots. The data are daily rainfall totals and so the x-axis is the date in daytime format %d %m

Answer 1

It is not easy, but this works:

#sample df with dates of one year, rf are random integers
np.random.seed(100)
N = 365
start = pd.to_datetime('2015-02-24')
rng = pd.date_range(start, periods=N)

final = pd.DataFrame({'date': rng, 'rf': np.random.randint(50, size=N)})  
print (final.head())
        date  rf
0 2015-02-24   8
1 2015-02-25  24
2 2015-02-26   3
3 2015-02-27  39
4 2015-02-28  23

fn = 'suptitle'
#rot - ratation of labels in axis x 
ax = final.plot(x='date', y='rf', kind='bar', rot='45')
plt.suptitle('{} Rainfall 2015-2016'.format(fn), fontsize=20)
plt.xlabel('Date', fontsize=18)
plt.ylabel('Rain / mm', fontsize=16)
#set cusom format of dates
ticklabels = final.date.dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(ticker.FixedFormatter(ticklabels))

#show only each 30th label, another are not visible
spacing = 30
visible = ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()[::spacing]
for label in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels():
    if label not in visible:
        label.set_visible(False)

plt.show()