Hiding axis text in matplotlib plots

Question

I m trying to plot a figure without tickmarks or numbers on either of the axes  I use axes in the traditional sense  not the matplotlib nomenclature    An issue I have come across is where matplotlib adjusts the x y ticklabels by subtracting a value N  then adds N at the end of the axis   This may be vague  but the following simplified example highlights the issue  with  6 18  being the offending value of N   import matplotlib pyplot as plt import random prefix   6 18  rx    prefix  0 001 random random    for i in arange 100   ry    prefix  0 001 random random    for i in arange 100   plt plot rx ry  ko    frame1   plt gca   for xlabel i in frame1 axes get xticklabels        xlabel i set visible False      xlabel i set fontsize 0 0  for xlabel i in frame1 axes get yticklabels        xlabel i set fontsize 0 0      xlabel i set visible False  for tick in frame1 axes get xticklines        tick set visible False  for tick in frame1 axes get yticklines        tick set visible False   plt show     The three things I would like to know are    How to turn off this behaviour in the first place  although in most cases it is useful  it is not always   I have looked through matplotlib axis XAxis and cannot find anything appropriate How can I make N disappear  i e  X set visible False   Is there a better way to do the above anyway  My final plot would be 4x4 subplots in a figure  if that is relevant

User · Answer

When using the object oriented API  the Axes object has two useful methods for removing the axis text  set xticklabels   and set xticks     Say you create a plot using   fig  ax   plt subplots 1  ax plot x  y    If you simply want to remove the tick labels  you could use  ax set xticklabels       or to remove the ticks completely  you could use  ax set xticks       These methods are useful for specifying exactly where you want the ticks and how you want them labeled   Passing an empty list results in no ticks  or no labels  respectively

User · Answer

I ve colour coded this figure to ease the process   import matplotlib pyplot as plt fig   plt figure   ax   fig add subplot 111      You can have full control over the figure using these commands  to complete the answer I ve add also the control over the splines   ax spines  top   set visible False  ax spines  right   set visible False     X AXIS -BORDER ax spines  bottom   set visible False    BLUE ax set xticklabels       RED ax set xticks       RED AND BLUE TOGETHER ax axes get xaxis   set visible False     Y AXIS -BORDER ax spines  left   set visible False    YELLOW ax set yticklabels       GREEN ax set yticks       YELLOW AND GREEN TOGHETHER ax axes get yaxis   set visible False

User · Answer

Somewhat of an old thread but  this seems to be a faster method using the latest version of matplotlib   set the major formatter for the x-axis  ax xaxis set major formatter plt NullFormatter

User · Answer

Instead of hiding each element  you can hide the whole axis   frame1 axes get xaxis   set visible False  frame1 axes get yaxis   set visible False    Or  you can set the ticks to an empty list   frame1 axes get xaxis   set ticks     frame1 axes get yaxis   set ticks       In this second option  you can still use plt xlabel   and plt ylabel   to add labels to the axes

User · Answer

If you want to hide just the axis text keeping the grid lines   frame1   plt gca   frame1 axes xaxis set ticklabels     frame1 axes yaxis set ticklabels       Doing set visible False  or set ticks     will also hide the grid lines

User · Answer

One trick could be setting the color of tick labels as white to hide it  plt xticks color  w   plt yticks color  w    or to be more generalized   Armin Okic   you can set it as  quot None quot

User · Answer

I was not actually able to render an image without borders or axis data based on any of the code snippets here  even the one accepted at the answer   After digging through some API documentation  I landed on this code to render my image  plt axis  off   plt tick params axis  both   left  off   top  off   right  off   bottom  off   labelleft  off   labeltop  off   labelright  off   labelbottom  off   plt savefig  foo png   dpi 100  bbox inches  tight   pad inches 0 0    I used the tick params call to basically shut down any extra information that might be rendered and I have a perfect graph in my output file

User · Answer

If you are like me and don t always retrieve the axes  ax  when plotting the figure  then a simple solution would be to do   plt xticks     plt yticks

[python] Hiding axis text in matplotlib plots

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