scatter plots with string arrays in matplotlib

Question

this seems like it should be an easy one but I can't figure it out. I have a pandas data frame and would like to do a 3D scatter plot with 3 of the columns. The X and Y columns are not numeric, they are strings, but I don't see how this should be a problem.

X= myDataFrame.columnX.values #string
Y= myDataFrame.columnY.values #string
Z= myDataFrame.columnY.values #float

fig = pl.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
ax.scatter(X, Y, np.log10(Z), s=20, c='b')
pl.show()

isn't there an easy way to do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Scatter does this automatically now (from at least matplotlib 2.1.0):

plt.scatter(['A', 'B', 'B', 'C'], [0, 1, 2, 1])