Bug summary

It seems a bug was introduced in Matplotlib 3.8, in which numeric labels for bar charts are no longer getting converted to strings. When trying to add a legend, this causes anAttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'startswith'.

Code for reproduction

importnumpyasnpimportmatplotlib.pyplotaspltplt.bar(np.arange(10),np.random.rand(10),label=1)plt.legend()# fails

Actual outcome

File/software/anaconda3/lib/python3.11/site-packages/matplotlib/axes/_axes.py:322inlegendhandles,labels,kwargs=mlegend._parse_legend_args([self],*args,**kwargs)File/software/anaconda3/lib/python3.11/site-packages/matplotlib/legend.py:1361in_parse_legend_argshandles,labels=_get_legend_handles_labels(axs,handlers)File/software/anaconda3/lib/python3.11/site-packages/matplotlib/legend.py:1291in_get_legend_handles_labelsiflabelandnotlabel.startswith('_'):AttributeError:'int'objecthasnoattribute'startswith'

Expected outcome

Legend should work and show "1" as the label (as it did in Matplotlib 3.7).

Additional information

• It seems this bug was introduced in 3.8.0 (it worked in 3.7.1).
• It's onlyplt.bar() that's affected;plt.plot() for example works fine.
• Converting manually to a string (label=str(1)) prevents the error.
• Possibly unrelated, but I'm wondering if it has anything to do withthis change regarding thestartswith conditional.

Operating system

Ubuntu

Matplotlib Version

3.8.0

Matplotlib Backend

Qt5Agg

Python version

3.11.3

Jupyter version

No response

Installation

conda