[FIXED] Format y axis as percent

Issue

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

Solution

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.

Answered By - Mad Physicist