Placing date ticks using recurrence rules

The iCalender RFC specifies recurrence rules (rrules), that define date sequences. You can use rrules in Matplotlib to place date ticks.

This example sets custom date ticks on every 5th easter.

See https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/rrule.html for help with rrules.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.dates import (YEARLY, DateFormatter,
                              rrulewrapper, RRuleLocator, drange)
import numpy as np
import datetime

# Fixing random state for reproducibility
np.random.seed(19680801)


# tick every 5th easter
rule = rrulewrapper(YEARLY, byeaster=1, interval=5)
loc = RRuleLocator(rule)
formatter = DateFormatter('%m/%d/%y')
date1 = datetime.date(1952, 1, 1)
date2 = datetime.date(2004, 4, 12)
delta = datetime.timedelta(days=100)

dates = drange(date1, date2, delta)
s = np.random.rand(len(dates))  # make up some random y values


fig, ax = plt.subplots()
plt.plot(dates, s, 'o')
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(loc)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)
ax.xaxis.set_tick_params(rotation=30, labelsize=10)

plt.show()