get_xticklabels() contains empty text instances

Question

I am trying to rotate the x tick labels in a plot. I created a general function that plots in the style I want to plot. I do the following:

labels=ax2.get_xt         


        

Answer 1

I will answer according to the title in your question because I don't understand the explanation that follows it.

The tick labels are not populated until the figure is drawn.

plt.plot([1, 2])
ax = plt.gca()
labels = ax.get_xticklabels()
for label in labels:
    print(label)

Output:

Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'')

When you call plt.draw() the tick labels are populated:

plt.plot([1, 2])
ax = plt.gca()
plt.draw()
labels = ax.get_xticklabels()
for label in labels:
    print(label)

Output:

Text(0,0,'')
Text(0,0,'0.0')
Text(0.2,0,'0.2')
Text(0.4,0,'0.4')
Text(0.6,0,'0.6')
Text(0.8,0,'0.8')
Text(1,0,'1.0')
Text(0,0,'')

Answer 2

for tl in ax2.get_xticklabels():
    tl.set_rotation(30)

Answer 3

I am not sure if this is the kind of solution you wanted. I had a DataFrame whose x-ticks are all names of different cases. I had to do something like this.

ax.set_xticks(np.arange(len(my_df.index)))
ax.set_xticklabels([case for case in my_df.columns], rotation=30)