How can I remove the top and right axis in matplotlib

Question

Instead of the default  boxed  axis style I want to have only the left and bottom axis  i e     ------                                          --- gt                         ------           -------   This should be easy  but I can t find the necessary options in the docs

User · Answer

Library Seaborn has this built in with function .despine().

Just add:

import seaborn as sns

Now create your graph. And add at the end:

sns.despine()

If you look at some of the default parameter values of the function it removes the top and right spine and keeps the bottom and left spine:

sns.despine(top=True, right=True, left=False, bottom=False)

Check out further documentation here: https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.despine.html

User · Answer

This is the suggested Matplotlib 3 solution from the official website HERE   import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt  x   np linspace 0  2 np pi  100  y   np sin x   ax   plt subplot 111  ax plot x  y     Hide the right and top spines ax spines  right   set visible False  ax spines  top   set visible False     Only show ticks on the left and bottom spines ax yaxis set ticks position  left   ax xaxis set ticks position  bottom    plt show

User · Answer

If you need to remove it from all your plots  you can remove spines in style settings  style sheet or rcParams   E g   import matplotlib as mpl  mpl rcParams  axes spines right     False mpl rcParams  axes spines top     False   If you want to remove all spines   mpl rcParams  axes spines left     False mpl rcParams  axes spines right     False mpl rcParams  axes spines top     False mpl rcParams  axes spines bottom     False

User · Answer

If you don t need ticks and such  e g  for plotting qualitative illustrations  you could also use this quick workaround    Make the axis invisible  e g  with plt gca   axison   False  and then draw them manually with plt arrow

User · Answer

Alternatively  this  def simpleaxis ax       ax spines  top   set visible False      ax spines  right   set visible False      ax get xaxis   tick bottom       ax get yaxis   tick left     seems to achieve the same effect on an axis without losing rotated label support    Matplotlib 1 0 1  solution inspired by this

User · Answer

This is more of an extension comment  in addition to the comprehensive answers here      Note that we can hide each of these three elements independently of each other    To hide the border  aka  spine    ax set frame on False  or ax spines  top   set visible False  To hide the ticks  ax tick params top False  To hide the labels  ax tick params labeltop False

User · Answer

edit  matplotlib in now  2013-10  on version 1 3 0 which includes this  That ability was actually just added  and you need the Subversion version for it   You can see the example code here   I am just updating to say that there s a better example online now   Still need the Subversion version though  there hasn t been a release with this yet    edit  Matplotlib 0 99 0 RC1 was just released  and includes this capability

[python] How can I remove the top and right axis in matplotlib?

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