Format y axis as percent

Question

I have an existing plot that was created with pandas like this:

df['myvar'].plot(kind='bar')

The y axis is format as float and I want to change the y axis to percentages. All of the solutions I found use ax.xyz syntax and I can only place code below the line above that creates the plot (I cannot add ax=ax to the line above.)

How can I format the y axis as percentages without changing the line above?

Here is the solution I found but requires that I redefine the plot:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.ticker as mtick

data = [8,12,15,17,18,18.5]
perc = np.linspace(0,100,len(data))

fig = plt.figure(1, (7,4))
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)

ax.plot(perc, data)

fmt = '%.0f%%' # Format you want the ticks, e.g. '40%'
xticks = mtick.FormatStrFormatter(fmt)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(xticks)

plt.show()

Link to the above solution: Pyplot: using percentage on x axis

Answer 1

This is a few months late, but I have created PR#6251 with matplotlib to add a new PercentFormatter class. With this class you just need one line to reformat your axis (two if you count the import of matplotlib.ticker):

import ...
import matplotlib.ticker as mtick

ax = df['myvar'].plot(kind='bar')
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.PercentFormatter())

PercentFormatter() accepts three arguments, xmax, decimals, symbol. xmax allows you to set the value that corresponds to 100% on the axis. This is nice if you have data from 0.0 to 1.0 and you want to display it from 0% to 100%. Just do PercentFormatter(1.0).

The other two parameters allow you to set the number of digits after the decimal point and the symbol. They default to None and '%', respectively. decimals=None will automatically set the number of decimal points based on how much of the axes you are showing.

Update

PercentFormatter was introduced into Matplotlib proper in version 2.1.0.