matplotlib - Remove axis legend
I’ve been working with matplotlib a bit recently, and I wanted to remove all axis legends from my chart. It took me a bit longer than I expected to figure it out so I thought I’d write it up.
Before we do anything let’s import matplotlib as well as pandas, since we’re going to plot data from a pandas DataFrame.
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('fivethirtyeight')Next we’ll create a DataFrame with one column called label and another called count:
df = pd.DataFrame({"label": ["A", "B", "C", "D"], "count": [12, 19, 5, 10]})We want to plot a bar chart with the label on the x-axis and the count on the y-axis. The following code will plot a chart and store it in an SVG file:
df.plot(kind='bar', x='label', y='count')
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig("/tmp/matplotlib_legends.svg")
plt.close()This is what the chart looks like:
We’ve got legends for both axes, but we can pass in legend=None to the plot() function which should sort that out:
df.plot(kind='bar', x='label', y='count', legend=None)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig("/tmp/matplotlib_no_y.svg")
plt.close()This is what the chart looks like now:
The y-axis legend has been removed, but the x-axis one is still there. After a bit of searching I found the set_label_text function, which we can use like this:
ax = df.plot(kind='bar', x='label', y='count', legend=None)
ax.xaxis.set_label_text("")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig("/tmp/matplotlib_no_x_no_y.svg")
plt.close()And now we finally have a chart with all legends removed:
Success!
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.