How to plot a pandas timeseries using months/year resolution (with few lines of code)?

Question

Assume we want to plot a time series, e.g.:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

a=pd.DatetimeIndex(start=\'2010-01-01\',end=\'2014-01-01\' , freq=\'D\')
         


        

Answer 1

Pandas does some really weird stuff to the Axes objects, making it hard to avoid matplotlib calls.

Here's how I would do it

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import pandas as pd


a = pd.DatetimeIndex(start='2010-01-01',end='2014-01-01' , freq='D')
b = pd.Series(np.random.randn(len(a)), index=a)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(b.index, b)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m'))

which give me: