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pythonmatplotlibseabornfacet-gridcatplot

How to rotate xticklabels in a seaborn catplot

I'm not able to rotate my xlabels in Seaborn/Matplotlib. I have tried many different solutions but not able to fix it. I have seen many related questions here on stackoverflow, but they have not worked for me.

My current plot looks like this, but I want the xlabels to rotate 90.

enter image description here

@staticmethod
def plotPrestasjon(plot):
    sns.set(style="darkgrid")
    ax = sns.catplot(x="COURSE", y="FINISH", hue="COURSE",
                     col="BIB#", data=plot, s=9, palette="Set2")
    ax.set(xlabel='COURSES', ylabel='FINISH (sec)')
    plt.show()

I have tried:

ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=90)

But that fails to generate the plot. Any ideas how I can fix it?

Solution
    • The correct way to set the xticklabels for sns.catplot, according to the documentation, is with the .set_xticklabels method (.e.g. g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30)).
    • Using a loop to iterate through the Axes, should be used if changes need to be made on a plot by plot basis, within the FacetGrid.
    • Building structured multi-plot grids
    • seaborn.FacetGrid
    • g, or in the case of the OP, ax is a seaborn.axisgrid.FacetGrid
      • When iterating through ax.axes.flat, axes is a <class 'matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot'>, which has a wide array of class methods, including .get_xticklabels().
    • In cases with many columns, and col_wrap= is used, g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30) may result in removing all the xticklabels.
      • Instead, labels= must be specified, g.set_xticklabels(g.axes.flat[-1].get_xticklabels(), rotation=30), where g.axes.flat[-1] should be the last facet axes with xticklabels.
      • Alternatively, use g.tick_params(axis='x', rotation=30)
    • Tested in python 3.12, matplotlib 3.8.1, seaborn 0.13.0

    One Row & Multiple Columns

    import seaborn as sns

# load data
exercise = sns.load_dataset("exercise")

# plot catplot
g = sns.catplot(x="time", y="pulse", hue="kind", col="diet", data=exercise)

# set rotation
g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30)

    enter image description here

    Multiple Rows & Columns

    # plot catplot
g = sns.catplot(x="time", y="pulse", hue="diet", col="kind", col_wrap=2, data=exercise)

# set rotation using one of the following options
# g.set_xticklabels(labels=g.axes.flat[-1].get_xticklabels(), rotation=30)
g.tick_params(axis='x', rotation=30)

    enter image description here

    • Using g.set_xticklabels(g.get_xticklabels(), rotation=30) results in an AttributeError.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-442-d1d39d8cc4f0> in <module>
      1 g = sns.catplot(x="time", y="pulse", hue="kind", col="diet", data=exercise)
----> 2 g.set_xticklabels(g.get_xticklabels(), rotation=30)

AttributeError: 'FacetGrid' object has no attribute 'get_xticklabels'