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I'm using subplots in matplotlib. Since all of my subplots have the same x-axis, I only want to label the x-axis on my bottom plot. How can I remove xtics from just one axis?

Dan
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    Do you want to get rid of just the tick labels, or the actual tick lines themselves? If it's just the labels, check out the demo [here](http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/subplots_demo.html) where there are several examples using subplots. – wflynny Aug 15 '13 at 16:40
  • Just the labels, I suppose. – Dan Aug 15 '13 at 16:52
  • @Bill: That demo uses matplotlib.pyplot. Is there a way to do this acting directly on the `figure` objects? – Dan Aug 15 '13 at 17:00

2 Answers2

4

As pointed out here, the following works!

plt.tick_params(\
    axis='x',          # changes apply to the x-axis
    which='both',      # both major and minor ticks are affected
    bottom='off',      # ticks along the bottom edge are off
    top='off',         # ticks along the top edge are off
    labelbottom='off') # labels along the bottom edge are off
Community
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StackG
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3

Dan, if you've set up your plots in an OOP way using

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax_arr = subplots(3, 1, sharex=True)

then it should be easy to hide the x-axis labels using something like

plt.setp([a.get_xticklabels() for a in f.axes[:-1]], visible=False)
# or
plt.setp([a.get_xticklabels() for a in ax_arr[:-1]], visible=False)

But check out this link and some of the further down examples will prove useful.

Edit:

If you can't use plt.subplots(), I'm still assuming you can do

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(211)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(212)

ax1.plot(x1, y1)
ax2.plot(x2, y2)

plt.setp(ax1.get_xticklabels(), visible=False)

If you have more than 2 subplots, such as 

ax1 = fig.add_subplot(N11)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(N12)
...
axN = fig.add_subplot(N1N)

plt.setp([a.get_xticklabels() for a in (ax1, ..., axN-1)], visible=False)
wflynny
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