[Solved]-How to prevent empty bars from taking up width in Chart.js bar chart-Chart.js

@drarig29's answer is correct -- null values plus skipnull removes the extra bars. however, if you're using barpercentage, your bars will fluctuate in width (varies from being a 1/5th of the width to 100% of the width, in my case, depending on how many bars there are), so you must set a maxbarthickness on the dataset to prevent them from growing.