Matplotlib histograms (basic questions)

Question

I am trying to plot a simple histogram using matplotlib. I have for example (I will in practice be using different distance functions)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import itertools


def hamdist(str1, str2):
    """Count the # of differences between equal length strings str1 and str2"""
    if (len(str1) != len(str2)):
        print str1, str2, "Length mismatch bozo!!!!!!"
    diffs = 0
    for ch1, ch2 in itertools.izip(str1, str2):
        if ch1 != ch2:
            diffs += 1
    return diffs

n = 10
bins=np.arange(0,n+2,1)
hamdists = []
for str1 in itertools.product('01', repeat = n):
    for str2 in itertools.product('01', repeat = n):
        hamdists.append(hamdist(str1, str2))
plt.hist(hamdists, bins=bins)
plt.show()

I get a histogram that looks like this.

How do I do the following?

1. Change the x-axis so that the last bar counts the number for x = 10. If I simply change to bins=np.arange(0,11,1) this cuts off the value for x = 10.
2. Label every point in the x-axis
3. Move the x-axis labels to be under the middle of the bars and not at the start of them as they are now.

Answer 1

Your first and third points can be solved by setting the align keyword of the histogram function (which defaults to 'mid', the center of the bin). The second by manually setting the xticks.

See:

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,1)

ax.hist(hamdists, bins=bins, align='left')
ax.set_xticks(bins[:-1])