.. _sphx_glr_gallery_ticks_and_spines_date_index_formatter.py:


====================
Date Index Formatter
====================

When plotting daily data, a frequent request is to plot the data
ignoring skips, e.g., no extra spaces for weekends.  This is particularly
common in financial time series, when you may have data for M-F and
not Sat, Sun and you don't want gaps in the x axis.  The approach is
to simply use the integer index for the xdata and a custom tick
Formatter to get the appropriate date string for a given index.




.. image:: /gallery/ticks_and_spines/images/sphx_glr_date_index_formatter_001.png
    :align: center


.. rst-class:: sphx-glr-script-out

 Out::

    loading /home/tcaswell/.virtualenvs/bleeding/lib/python3.7/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/sample_data/msft.csv




|


.. code-block:: python


    from __future__ import print_function
    import numpy as np
    from matplotlib.mlab import csv2rec
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    import matplotlib.cbook as cbook
    from matplotlib.ticker import Formatter

    datafile = cbook.get_sample_data('msft.csv', asfileobj=False)
    print('loading %s' % datafile)
    r = csv2rec(datafile)[-40:]


    class MyFormatter(Formatter):
        def __init__(self, dates, fmt='%Y-%m-%d'):
            self.dates = dates
            self.fmt = fmt

        def __call__(self, x, pos=0):
            'Return the label for time x at position pos'
            ind = int(np.round(x))
            if ind >= len(self.dates) or ind < 0:
                return ''

            return self.dates[ind].strftime(self.fmt)

    formatter = MyFormatter(r.date)

    fig, ax = plt.subplots()
    ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)
    ax.plot(np.arange(len(r)), r.close, 'o-')
    fig.autofmt_xdate()
    plt.show()

**Total running time of the script:** ( 0 minutes  0.030 seconds)



.. only :: html

 .. container:: sphx-glr-footer


  .. container:: sphx-glr-download

     :download:`Download Python source code: date_index_formatter.py <date_index_formatter.py>`



  .. container:: sphx-glr-download

     :download:`Download Jupyter notebook: date_index_formatter.ipynb <date_index_formatter.ipynb>`


.. only:: html

 .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-signature

    `Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery <https://sphinx-gallery.readthedocs.io>`_