I am trying to plot information against dates. I have a list of dates in the format "01/02/1991".
I converted them by doing the following:
x = parser.parse(date).strftime('%Y%m%d'))
which gives 19910102
Then I tried to use num2date
import matplotlib.dates as dates
new_x = dates.num2date(x)
Plotting:
plt.plot_date(new_x, other_data, fmt="bo", tz=None, xdate=True)
But I get an error. It says "ValueError: year is out of range". Any solutions?
As @KyssTao has been saying, help(dates.num2date) says that the x has to be a float giving the number of days since 0001-01-01 plus one. Hence, 19910102 is not 2/Jan/1991, because if you counted 19910101 days from 0001-01-01 you'd get something in the year 54513 or similar (divide by 365.25, number of days in a year).
Use datestr2num instead (see help(dates.datestr2num)):
new_x = dates.datestr2num(date) # where date is '01/02/1991'