Was there a way to pass a dictionary to an axes method to set instance variables all at once without calling .set_xlim(), .set_ylim(), and so on individually? I know Matlab has this feature and I thought Matplotlib as well but cannot find the documentation.
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1 Answer
It's plt.setp (Also see getp).
As a quick example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
linestyle = dict(color='red', marker='^', linestyle='--', linewidth=2)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
line, = ax.plot(range(10))
plt.setp(ax, xlim=[-1, 12], ylim=[-5, 12], xlabel='X-axis')
plt.setp(line, **linestyle)
plt.show()
setp and getp are "matlab-isms", so a lot of people feel that they are "unpythonic" and shouldn't be used unless absolutely necessary.
Obviously, you can do all of this in other ways (e.g. setting the axis limits with ax.axis([xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax]) or just expanding the linestyle dict when calling plot).
setp is still very useful, though. It automatically operates on sequences of artists, so you can do things like plt.setp([ax1, ax2, ax3], **parameters). This is especially handy for things like ticks and ticklabels, where you're often operating of a bunch of artists at once.
It also allows for easy introspection of matplotlib artists. Try calling things like plt.setp(ax) to see a list of all parameters or plt.setp(line, 'marker') to see a list of all valid arguments to line.set_marker.
4 Comments
hatmatrix
Thanks! How is that unpythonic though? It's so awesome.
hatmatrix
I can't imagine why the verbose
set_ methods confer any practical or aesthetic advantage.
Joe Kington
I agree.
setp and getp are quite handy. The setters and getters are partly there because they pre-date python having properties, but in this case, they're what allow setp to work without a lot of "magical" code. It just looks for methods that start with "set" (of course, you could still do this with properties). Either way, I completely agree that the setters and getters are some of matplotlib's bigger warts.Joe Kington
On another side note, all matplotlib artists have a
artist.set and artist.get method that allows for most of the same functionality.