Change the ticklabel orientation and legend position of plot

Question

I am plotting a bar graph by reading data from a CSV using pandas in Python. I read a CSV into a DataFrame and plot them using matplotlib.

Here is how my CSV looks like:

SegmentName    Sample1   Sample2   Sample3

Loop1          100       100       100

Loop2          100       100       100

---

res = DataFrame(pd.read_csv("results.csv", index_col="SegmentName"))

I plot and set the legend to be outside.

plt.figure()
ax = res.plot(kind='bar')
ax.legend(loc='center left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5))

plt.savefig("results.jpg")

However, the x-axis ticklabels are orientated vertically and hence I can't read the text. Also my legend outside is cut off.

Can I change the orientation of the ticklabels to be horizontal, and then adjust the entire figure so that the legend is visible?

Answer 1

Try using the 'rotation' keyword when you set the label. E.g.:

plt.xlabel('hi',rotation=90)

Or if you need to rotate the tick labels, try:

plt.xticks(rotation=90)

As for the positioning of the legend etc., it is probably worth taking a look at the tight layout guide

Answer 2

For the rotation of the labels, you can simply tell pandas to rotate it for you by giving the number of degrees to the rot argument. The legends being cut off is answered elsewhere as well, like here:

df = pd.DataFrame.from_items([('A', [1, 2, 3]), ('B', [4, 5, 6])],
                              orient='index', columns=['one', 'two', 'three'])
ax = df.plot(kind='bar', rot=90)
lgd = ax.legend(loc='center left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5))
fig.savefig("results.jpg", bbox_extra_artists=(lgd,), bbox_inches='tight')