how to increase space between bar and increase bar width in matplotlib - dataframe

Question

i am web-scraping a wikipedia table directly from wikipedia website and plot the table. i want to increase the bar width, add space between the bars and make all bars visible. pls how can i do? my code below
#########scrapping#########
html= requests.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Nigeria")
bsObj= BeautifulSoup(html.content, 'html.parser')
states= []
cases=[]
for items in bsObj.find("table",{"class":"wikitable sortable"}).find_all('tr')[1:37]:
data = items.find_all(['th',{"align":"left"},'td'])
states.append(data[0].a.text)
cases.append(data[1].b.text)
########Dataframe#########
table= ["STATES","CASES"]
tab= pd.DataFrame(list(zip(states,cases)),columns=table)
tab["CASES"]=tab["CASES"].replace('\n','', regex=True)
tab["CASES"]=tab["CASES"].replace(',','', regex=True)
tab['CASES'] = pd.to_numeric(tab['CASES'], errors='coerce')
tab["CASES"]=tab["CASES"].fillna(0)
tab["CASES"] = tab["CASES"].values.astype(int)
#######matplotlib########
x=tab["STATES"]
y=tab["CASES"]
plt.cla()
plt.locator_params(axis='y', nbins=len(y)/4)
plt.bar(x,y, color="blue")
plt.xticks(fontsize= 8,rotation='vertical')
plt.yticks(fontsize= 8)
plt.show()

Answer 1

Use pandas.read_html and barh
.read_html will read all tables tags from a website and return a list of dataframes.
barh will make horizontal instead of vertical bars, which is useful if there are a lot of bars.
Make the plot longer, if needed. In this case, (16.0, 10.0), increase 10.
I'd recommend using a log scale for x, because Lagos has so many cases compared to Kogi
This doesn't put more space between the bars, but the formatted plot is more legible with its increased dimensions and horizontal bars.
.iloc[:36, :5] removes some unneeded columns and rows from the dataframe.
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# url
url = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Nigeria'
# create dataframe list
dataframe_list = pd.read_html(url) # this is a list of all the tables at the url as dataframes
# get the dataframe from the list
df = dataframe_list[2].iloc[:36, :5] # you want the dataframe at index 2
# replace '-' with 0
df.replace('–', 0, inplace=True)
# set to int
for col in df.columns[1:]:
df[col] = df[col].astype('int')
# plot a horizontal bar
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (16.0, 10.0)
plt.style.use('ggplot')
p = plt.barh(width='Cases', y='State', data=df, color='purple')
plt.xscale('log')
plt.xlabel('Number of Cases')
plt.show()
Plot all the data in df
df.set_index('State', inplace=True)
plt.figure(figsize=(14, 14))
df.plot.barh()
plt.xscale('log')
plt.show()
4 subplots
State as index
plt.figure(figsize=(14, 14))
for i, col in enumerate(df.columns, 1):
plt.subplot(2, 2, i)
df[col].plot.barh(label=col, color='green')
plt.xscale('log')
plt.legend()
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()