Python – How to separate the x scale and scale the y axis on a bar chart

I have the following code to create a small data frame and corresponding score for each country:

import pandas
import numpy 
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df = pandas. DataFrame(data = ["Norway", "Denmark", "Iceland", 
"Switzerland", "Finland", "Netherlands", "Canada", "New Zealand", 
"Sweden", "Australia"], columns = ["Countries"])
df["Score"] = [7.6, 7.55, 7.50, 7.45, 7.40, 7.35, 7.30, 7.25, 7.20, 
7.15]

Then I create a bar chart using matplotlib:

bars = df['Countries']
height = df['Score']
plt.bar(bars, height, align = "center", alpha = 0.5)
plt.ylabel('Happiness Score')
plt.title('Happiness by Country')
plt.show

I’m not sure how to do two things:
1) Separate the country names on the x-axis so that they do not cross each other
2) Scale the y-axis differently so that all the scores don’t look so close

You can simply rotate the labels to avoid overlapping according to your preference. Another option is to use wide-spaced x positions for your bar charts. However, since country names are long and not equal in length, I don’t recommend it.

EDIT: For completeness, I’ve added Rocky Li’s suggestion about scaling the y-axis.

plt.xticks(rotation=45)
plt.ylim(7, 8)