pandas.core.groupby.SeriesGroupBy.hist doesn't take kwargs

[vladfi1]

I'd like to pass certain kwargs to the hist function of a SeriesGroupBy object (alpha, legend, etc). The plot function provides more kwargs (e.g. legend, but not alpha) but no **kwargs to forward to matplotlib. The documentation (viewed with ? in ipython) suggests that there should be a kwds argument, but in reality this is not the case.

[jreback]

hmm can u show pandas version and how you are calling?

[vladfi1]

Here is a simple case:

from pandas import DataFrame

df = DataFrame({'a': [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3], 'b': [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]})

series = df.groupby('a').b

series.hist(legend=True)

The last line fails with

TypeError: hist() got an unexpected keyword argument 'legend'

[jreback]

as a work-around you can do:

series.plot(kind='hist',legend=True) (and it accepts arbitrary keywords).

[vladfi1]

Sadly, as I mentioned in my original post, plot does not take arbitrary keywords. The following fails:

series.plot(kind='hist', alpha=0.5)
TypeError: plot() got an unexpected keyword argument 'alpha'

[jreback]

you must have an older version. Works in 0.15

In [1]: df = DataFrame({'a': [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3], 'b': [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]})

In [2]: series = df.groupby('a').b

In [3]: series.hist(legend=True)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-813022ddf964> in <module>()
----> 1 series.hist(legend=True)

TypeError: hist() got an unexpected keyword argument 'legend'

In [4]: series.plot(kind='hist',legend=True)
Out[4]: 
a
1    Axes(0.125,0.1;0.775x0.8)
2    Axes(0.125,0.1;0.775x0.8)
3    Axes(0.125,0.1;0.775x0.8)
Name: b, dtype: object

In [5]: pd.__version__
Out[5]: '0.15.0'

[vladfi1]

I recently pip installed pandas 0.15:

import pandas.version
print pandas.version.version
0.15.0

[jreback]

you changed the example. legendis a defined kw. Ok. pls submit a pull-request if you can.

[jreback]

@TomAugspurger

[vladfi1]

Can you tell me what you thought works in 0.15?

[jreback]

exactly what I wrote before

series.plot(kind='hist',legend=False)