The matplotlib library in Python comes with a number of useful functions and customizations that help you modify your plot to a great extent. In this tutorial, we will look at how to get the axis range of a matplotlib plot with the help of some examples.
Get Axis Limits using xlim()
and ylim()
You can use the maplotlib.pyplot
‘s xlim()
and ylim()
functions to get the axis ranges for the x-axis and the y-axis respectively. These functions are used to set the axis range (axis limits) by passing the range as a tuple but if you do not pass anything, it returns the current axis limits.
The following is the syntax –
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # create a plot - for example, a scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # get the x-axis limits plt.xlim( # get the y-axis limits plt.ylim()
Let’s now look at some examples of using the above syntax. For this, we will be using the US dollar to Indian rupee conversion data from 2011 to 2020. Let’s plot the data as a scatter plot.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # x values - years x = [2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020] # y values - 1 USD in INR y = [46.67, 53.44, 56.57, 62.33, 62.97, 66.46, 67.79, 70.09, 70.39, 76.38] # plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR')
Output:
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Flatiron School
Flatiron School
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University of Maryland Global Campus
Creighton University
Creighton University

Example 1 – Get the x-axis range with xlim()
Let’s get the range of values in the x-axis.
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # get the x-axis range print(plt.xlim())
Output:

Example 2 – Get the y-axis range with ylim()
You can similarly get the y-axis limits using the ylim()
function on the matplotlib pyplot object plt
without any arguments.
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # get the y-axis range plt.ylim()
Output:

We get the y-axis range as (45.1845, 77.8655).
Note that if you’re working with multiple subplots you can use the get_xlim()
and get_ylim()
functions on the individual axes
objects (for example ax1
) to get the axis limits for each subplot.
You might also be interested in –
- Change Font Size of elements in a Matplotlib plot
- Plot a Line Chart in Python with Matplotlib
- Create a Scatter Plot in Python with Matplotlib
- Change Background Color of Plot in Matplotlib
- Add Trendline to a Maplotlib Plot with Code and Output
- How to Add Title to a Plot in Matplotlib? (Code Examples with Output)
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