How to get evenly-spaced datetime tick labels regardless of x-values of data points?

[Mark17]

If you look at the documentation for matplotlib.ticker

https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/ticker_api.html

You see this

There are a number of locators specialized for date locations - see the dates module.

Follow the link:

Here's what I ended up with:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
 
sample_data = [3, 6, 2, 12, 15]
e = pd.date_range('2010-01-01', '2011-12-31',5) #these will be x-coordinates for data
f = pd.date_range('2009-06-30', '2014-12-31',10) #these will be x-axis labels
f = f.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') #reformatted axis labels
 
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1) 
ax.plot(e,sample_data)
ax.set_xticks(f, f, rotation=90) 
plt.show()

That seems to work.

Thanks all!