In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove the tick labels from a matplotlib plot with the help of some examples.
Hide Tick Labels and Ticks in a Plot
If you’re working with a single plot, then you can use the matplotlib.pyplot.tick_params()
function to hide or remove ticks and/or tick labels from one or both axes.
- To remove the tick labels from the x-axis, pass
labelbottom=False
and to remove the tick labels from the y-axis, passlabelleft=False
as an argument to thetick_params()
function. - To remove the ticks from the x-axis, pass
bottom=False
and to remove the ticks from the y-axis, pass left=False as an argument to thetick_params()
function.
Let’s now look at some examples of using the above syntax. First, we will create a scatter plot that we will be using throughout this tutorial.
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:
You can see that the ticks on the x-axis and the y-axis are labeled.
Example 1 – Remove Tick Labels from the Plot
Let’s now hide the ticks on the x-axis. To remove the x-axis labels, pass labelbottom=False
as an argument to the tick_params()
function. This argument essentially tells the function to not show the tick labels of the bottom axis (x-axis).
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR') # hide the x-axis tick labels plt.tick_params(labelbottom=False)
Output:
You can similarly remove the y-axis tick labels by passing labelleft=False
to the tick_params()
function.
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# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR') # hide the y-axis tick labels plt.tick_params(labelleft=False)
Output:
The y-axis tick labels are not present in the above plot.
Note that you can similarly remove the tick labels from both the x-axis and the y-axis together by passing labelbottom=False
and labelleft=False
as arguments.
Example 2 – Remove Ticks from a Plot
You can also use the plt.tick_params()
function to remove the ticks on the plot. Pass bottom=False
to remove the ticks from the x-axis and pass bottom=True
to remove the ticks from the y-axis.
Let’s remove the x-axis ticks.
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR') # hide the x-axis ticks plt.tick_params(bottom=False)
Output:
Let’s now remove the y-axis ticks.
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR') # hide the y-axis ticks plt.tick_params(left=False)
Output:
Example 3 – Putting it all together
In our final example, let’s remove the tick labels and the ticks from both the x-axis and the y-axis for the above scatter plot.
# plot x and y on scatter plot plt.scatter(x, y) # add axes labels plt.xlabel('Year') plt.ylabel('1USD in INR') # hide the ticks and tick labels for both the axes plt.tick_params(left=False, bottom=False, labelleft=False, labelbottom=False)
Output:
Both the ticks and the labels are removed.
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