title: Plotting a Pandas DataFrame of Char Data using matplotlib
body: <p>The data in the dataset is comprised purely of chars. For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>p,x,s,n,t,p,f,c,n,k,e,e,s,s,w,w,p,w,o,p,k,s,u
  e,x,s,y,t,a,f,c,b,k,e,c,s,s,w,w,p,w,o,p,n,n,g
  e,b,s,w,t,l,f,c,b,n,e,c,s,s,w,w,p,w,o,p,n,n,m
  p,x,y,w,t,p,f,c,n,n,e,e,s,s,w,w,p,w,o,p,k,s,u
  e,x,s,g,f,n,f,w,b,k,t,e,s,s,w,w,p,w,o,e,n,a,g
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>A complete copy of the data can be found in <a href="https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/mushroom/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">agaricus-lepiota.data in the uci machine learning datasets mushroom dataset</a></p>
  
  <p>Are there methods of visualisation for using char data (instead of having to convert the data set to numeric) via matplotlib?</p>
  
  <p>Just for any sort of visualization i.e:</p>
  
  <pre><code>filename = 'mushrooms.csv'
  df_mushrooms = pd.read_csv(filename, names = ["Classes", "Cap-Shape", "Cap-Surface", "Cap-Colour", "Bruises", "Odor", "Gill-Attachment", "Gill-Spacing", "Gill-Size", "Gill-Colour", "Stalk-Shape", "Stalk-Root", "Stalk-Surface-Above-Ring", "Stalk-Surface-Below-Ring", "Stalk-Colour-Above-Ring", "Stalk-Colour-Below-Ring", "Veil-Type", "Veil-Colour", "Ring-Number", "Ring-Type", "Spore-Print-Colour", "Population", "Habitat"])
  
  
  #If there are any entires (rows) with any missing values/NaN's drop the row.
  df_mushrooms.dropna(axis = 0, how = 'any', inplace = True)
  
  df_mushrooms.plot.scatter(x = 'Classes', y = 'Cap-Shape')
  </code></pre>