Modify the legend of pandas bar plot

Question

I am always bothered when I make a bar plot with pandas and I want to change the names of the labels in the legend  Consider for instance the output of this code   import pandas as pd from matplotlib pyplot import    df   pd DataFrame   A  26   B  20   index   N    df plot kind  bar      Now  if I want to change the name in the legend  I would usually try to do   legend   AAA    BBB      But I end up with this     In fact  the first dashed line seems to correspond to an additional patch    So I wonder if there is a simple trick here to change the labels  or do I need to plot each of the columns independently with matplotlib and set the labels myself  Thanks

User · Answer

If you need to call plot multiply times  you can also use the  label  argument   ax   df1 plot label  df1   y  y var   ax   df2 plot label  df2   y  y var     While this is not the case in the OP question  this can be helpful if the DataFrame is in long format and you use groupby before plotting

User · Answer

To change the labels for Pandas df plot   use ax legend         import pandas as pd import matplotlib pyplot as plt  fig  ax   plt subplots   df   pd DataFrame   A  26   B  20   index   N    df plot kind  bar   ax ax   ax   df plot kind  bar      quot same quot  as above ax legend   quot AAA quot    quot BBB quot       Another approach is to do the same by plt legend         import matplotlib pyplot as plt df plot kind  bar   plt legend   quot AAA quot    quot BBB quot

User · Answer

This is slightly an edge case but I think it can add some value to the other answers    If you add more details to the graph  say an annotation or a line  you ll soon discover that it is relevant when you call legend on the axis  if you call it at the bottom of the script it will capture different handles for the legend elements  messing everything   For instance the following script   df   pd DataFrame   A  26   B  20   index   N    ax   df plot kind  bar   ax hlines 23  - 5  5  linestyles  dashed   ax annotate  average   -0 4 23 5    ax legend   AAA    BBB      quickfix  move this at the third line   Will give you this figure  which is wrong    While this a toy example which can be easily fixed by changing the order of the commands  sometimes you ll need to modify the legend after several operations and hence the next method will give you more flexibility  Here for instance I ve also changed the fontsize and position of the legend   df   pd DataFrame   A  26   B  20   index   N    ax   df plot kind  bar   ax hlines 23  - 5  5  linestyles  dashed   ax annotate  average   -0 4 23 5   ax legend   AAA    BBB        do potentially more stuff here  h l   ax get legend handles labels   ax legend h  2    AAA    BBB    loc 3  fontsize 12    This is what you ll get

[python] Modify the legend of pandas bar plot

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