How to fix matplotlib .xlabel() AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'xlabel'

Problem:

You want to set the xlabel of a matplotlib plot using .xlabel("My xlabel") but you see an error messsage like

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-12-28a87d95bccc> in <module>
---> 11 axs[0].xlabel("My xlabel")

AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'xlabel'

Solution

Use .set_xlabel("My xlabel") instead of .xlabel("My xlabel") !

While

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

plt.xlabel("My xlabel")

works fine, if you have an axes object like the one you get from plt.subplots(), you’ll have to use set_xlabel()!

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig, axs = plt.subplots(2, 1)
# ...
axs[0].set_xlabel("My xlabel")