White space on the right when using bar Matlab

Question

I'm using the below code to save a figure:

fig1=figure('visible','off');
b = bar(bar_res);
x={'a' ;'b' ;'c'; 'd' ;'e'; 'f' ;'g'; 'h';...
     'i'; 'j' ;'k'; 'l'; 'm'; 'n' ;'o'; 'p' ;'q' ;'r'; 's';...
     't';'u'};
set(gca,'XTickLabel',x,'XTick',1:21);
rotateXLabels( gca, 90 );
with=char('Res with dash');
without=char('Res without dash');
legend('Reference',with,without,'Location','northwest');
set(gca,'FontSize',16);
y=ylabel('Number of trials','rot',90,'FontSize',18);
set(y,'Units','Normalized','Position',[-0.15, 0.5, 0]);
savefig('a.fig');
saveas(gca, 'a.png');

But I don't know why there is extra white space to the right as shown in the below figure:

Answer 1

Just set the x-limits with xlim:

set(gca,'XLim',[0 numel(x)+1]);

Example:

fig1 = figure('visible','on');
b = bar(randi(10,21,1).');
x = {'a' ;'b' ;'c'; 'd' ;'e'; 'f' ;'g'; 'h';...
     'i'; 'j' ;'k'; 'l'; 'm'; 'n' ;'o'; 'p' ;'q' ;'r'; 's';...
     't';'u'};
set(gca,'XTick',1:21);
set(gca,'XTickLabel',x);
set(gca,'XLim',[0 numel(x)+1]);
% rotateXLabels( gca, 90 );
with = char('Res with dash');
without = char('Res without dash');
legend('Reference',with,without,'Location','northwest');
set(gca,'FontSize',16);
y = ylabel('Number of trials','rot',90,'FontSize',18);

By the way, if you have Matlab R2014b or higher you don't need rotateXLabels anymore. Just use:

ax = gca;
ax.XTickLabelRotation = 90;

Answer 2

A simple solution may be if you call axis tight. However it may not be the result you want because it does remove the small spaces at the borders of the plot.