Choose matplotlib xticks frequency

Question

I am plotting data with strings as x labels. I'd like to control the label frequency to not overload the axis with text. In the example below i'd like to only see a label every 3 tick: a-d-g-j.

One way I could do that is to replace the my_xticks elements by 2 empty strings every n elements. But i'm sure it gives a cleaner way to do that.

Here is the code:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

y=np.array([4,4,4,5,5,6,5,5,4,4,4])
x = np.arange(y.shape[0])
my_xticks=['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k']

plt.xticks(x, my_xticks)
plt.plot(x, y)

Answer 1

You're almost there! Sample the first and second arguments of xticks at the desired frequency!

The question is a duplicate from Changing the "tick frequency" on x or y axis in matplotlib?

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

y = np.array([4,4,4,5,5,6,5,5,4,4,4])
x = np.arange(y.shape[0])
my_xticks = np.array(['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k'])
frequency = 3
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.xticks(x[::frequency], my_xticks[::frequency])