python - Date axis in heatmap seaborn

Question

A little info: I'm very new to programming and this is a small part of the my first script. The goal of this particular segment is to display a seaborn heatmap with vertical depth on y-axis, time on x-axis and intensity of a scientific measurement as the heat function.

I'd like to apologize if this has been answered elsewhere, but my searching abilities must have failed me.

sns.set()
nametag = 'Well_4_all_depths_capf'
Dp = D[D.well == 'well4']
print(Dp.date)


heat = Dp.pivot("depth",  "date", "capf")
### depth, date and capf are all columns of a pandas dataframe 

plt.title(nametag)

sns.heatmap(heat,  linewidths=.25)

plt.savefig('%s%s.png' % (pathheatcapf, nametag), dpi = 600)

this is the what prints from the ' print(Dp.date) ' so I'm pretty sure the formatting from the dataframe is in the format I want, particularly Year, day, month.

0    2016-08-09
1    2016-08-09
2    2016-08-09
3    2016-08-09
4    2016-08-09
5    2016-08-09
6    2016-08-09
         ...    

But, when I run it the date axis always prints with blank times (00:00 etc) that I don't want. Is there a way to remove these from the date axis?

Is the problem that in a cell above I used this function to scan the file name and make a column with the date??? Is it wrong to use datetime instead of just a date function?

D['date']=pd.to_datetime(['%s-%s-%s' %(f[0:4],f[4:6],f[6:8]) for f in             
D['filename']])

Answer 1

You have to use strftime function for your date series of dataframe to plot xtick labels correctly:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import random

dates = [datetime.today() - timedelta(days=x * random.getrandbits(1)) for x in xrange(25)]
df = pd.DataFrame({'depth': [0.1,0.05, 0.01, 0.005, 0.001, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01, 0.005, 0.001, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01, 0.005, 0.001, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01, 0.005, 0.001, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01, 0.005, 0.001],
 'date': dates,
 'value': [-4.1808639999999997, -9.1753490000000006, -11.408113999999999, -10.50245, -8.0274750000000008, -0.72260200000000008, -6.9963940000000004, -10.536339999999999, -9.5440649999999998, -7.1964070000000007, -0.39225599999999999, -6.6216390000000001, -9.5518009999999993, -9.2924690000000005, -6.7605589999999998, -0.65214700000000003, -6.8852289999999989, -9.4557760000000002, -8.9364629999999998, -6.4736289999999999, -0.96481800000000006, -6.051482, -9.7846860000000007, -8.5710630000000005, -6.1461209999999999]})
pivot = df.pivot(index='depth', columns='date', values='value')

sns.set()
ax = sns.heatmap(pivot)
ax.set_xticklabels(df['date'].dt.strftime('%d-%m-%Y'))
plt.xticks(rotation=-90)

plt.show()