How to display Chinese in pandas plot?

python pandas matplotlib fonts chinese-locale
joe picture joe · Jan 23, 2014 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

Here, I have a plot work to do with pandas, like this :

most_active_posts.plot(x = 'title',y = 'active_span',kind = 'barh')

most_active_posts is an object of dataframe with index, I want a simple two-dimentional plot with two columns, one is 'title' and the other is 'active_span'.

title is type of string, which contains Chinese characters, while active_span is type of integer .

How can I display Chinese characters normally?

Answer

zaxliu picture zaxliu · Nov 3, 2015

My work-around is like this:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
font = fm.FontProperties(fname='c:\\windows\\fonts\\simsun.ttc')  # speicify font
ax = most_active_posts.plot(x = 'title',y = 'active_span',kind = 'barh')
ax.set_xticklabels(most_active_posts['title'].str.decode('utf-8'), fontproperties=font)
plt.show()

Basically, you need to specify a valid font for Chinese characters.

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