Displaying timestamp in textarea using matplotlib - python-2.7

Question

i have a map that i plotted using matplotlib from a csv file that I read using pandas, i need to display the date of my data in a textearea so i am doing this:
Start =data.index.max()
End = data.index.min()
txt = 'Date debut:',End,'Date fin:',Start
props1 = dict(boxstyle='round', facecolor='wheat', alpha=0.5)
ax.text(0.17, 0.17, txt, transform=ax.transAxes, fontsize=8, bbox=props1, family = 'monospace')
plt.show()
And i got this results :
As you can see it's not a really satisfying result, so i need to adjust the text written on the map to the right bottom out of the map,insert a space between date début et date fin and finally hide the'timestamp' from the textarea and leave only the dates, how can I proceed ?

Answer 1

The text can be positionned using the first two arguments; just replace the numbers 0.17 by something else. In this respect it may help to use ha and va (horizontal and vertical alignment) and set them such that the coordinates can be easily chosen (e.g. ha="right" makes sense when specifying coordinates at the right side of the plot). Note that you may well chose negative values if that makes sense to you.
To format the string nicely you first want to convert the Timestamp to a string. This is done using the strftime method. As argument you specify a formatting sting, e.g. "%d %b %Y" for day month year format. A complete set of formatting option can of course be found in the python documentation.
A complete example may be:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
d = pd.date_range("2017-01-01","2017-06-30",freq="D" )
x = np.random.rand(len(d))
data = pd.DataFrame(x, index=d)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
start = data.index.min().strftime("%d %b %Y")
end = data.index.max().strftime("%d %b %Y")
txt = "Date debut: {}, date fin: {}".format(start, end)
props1 = dict(boxstyle='round', facecolor='wheat', alpha=0.5)
ax.text(0.98, 0.03, txt, transform=ax.transAxes, fontsize=8, bbox=props1,
family = 'monospace', ha="right", va="bottom")
plt.show()