Plotting Times Versus Dates While Skipping Unwanted Dates In Python

I want to make a program that monitors my 5000 meters progress. Inspired by this and this, I tried to make it work by combining some of the answers without any luck. from __future_

Solution 1:

Combining the answers from the questions linked:

You basically have to make sure that matplotlib cannot guess the format of the x-axis but can guess the format of the y-axis. With this matplotlib will not try to be smart and add dates you do not want to display on the x-axis but at the same time will be smart and sort the times for you on the y-axis.

from __future__ import division
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.ticker import FuncFormatter
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import numpy as np
import datetime as dt

def DistVel2Time(distance, velocity_kph):
    velocity_ms = velocity_kph / 3.6
    time_sec = distance / velocity_ms
    hours = int(time_sec//3600)
    minutes = int((time_sec%3600)//60)
    seconds = int(time_sec%60)
    # note that I return a timedelta object here
    return dt.timedelta(minutes=minutes, seconds=seconds)

# we have to choose a interpretable data-type here, simply take the total time needed in seconds
times = [ DistVel2Time(a, b).total_seconds() for a, b in [(5000, 13), (5000, 15), (5000, 14)]]

# here we want to make sure that matplotlib cannot interpret it so we use strings directly
# change the format as required
dates = [ "%00d.%00d.%000d" % ymd for ymd in [(2019,2,1), (2019,2,2), (2019,2,7)]]

# the formatting function taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48294332/plot-datetime-timedelta-using-matplotlib-and-python
def format_func(x, pos):
    hours = int(x//3600)
    minutes = int((x%3600)//60)
    seconds = int(x%60)

    return "{:d}:{:02d}:{:02d}".format(hours, minutes, seconds)

formatter = FuncFormatter(format_func)

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

ax.plot(dates, times, 'o--')
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)

plt.show()

It will produce a plot like this:

Solution 2:

Although @milck answered my questions, I made a more streamlined version myself inspired by his answer and the previously mentioned answers from the question.

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.ticker import FuncFormatter

def DistVel2Time(*velocity_kph):
    distance = 5000
    times = [int(distance / (_ / 3.6)) for _ in velocity_kph]
    return times

times = DistVel2Time(13, 15, 14)

dates = ["%00d.%00d.%000d" % dmy for dmy in [(1,2,2019), (2,2,2019), (7,2,2019)]]

def format_func(x, pos):
    #hours = int(x//3600)
    minutes = int((x%3600)//60)
    seconds = int(x%60)
    return "{:02d}:{:02d}".format(minutes, seconds)

formatter = FuncFormatter(format_func)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.plot(dates, times, 'D--')
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)
fig.autofmt_xdate()

plt.show()

This is shorter and perhaps easier to understand.