How to use linestyles in Matplotlib
Overview
A linestyle in Matplotlib is simply the style of a line plot in Matplotlib. Linestyles are used to beautify, differentiate, or give different visuals to plots in a single program.
In the Matplot library, the default linestyle whenever you make a plot without specifying the linestyle is the dash (--) linestyle.
When creating a linestyle in a plot, there are two plot() methods to choose from:
- Using the
linestylekeywords: Here, all you need do is use certain keywords to depict the style you want for your plot. They include:
solidlinestyledashedlinestyledashdotlinestyledottedlinestylenonelinestyle.
- Using the shorter syntax
ls: Here, all you need do is use the symbols representing the linestyle keywords. The shorter syntaxlsand their respectivelinestylekeywords are shown in the table below:
Linestyle keywords |
ls |
|---|---|
| solid | '-' |
| dashed | '--' |
| dashdot | '-.' |
| dotted | ':' |
| none | '' |
Example
Let’s create a plot of a solid linestyle using linestyle keywords and ls arguments.
The following is a code snippet using the linestyle keyword argument:
import matplotlib.pyplot as pltx = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]y = [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]fig,axs = plt.subplots(2,2)# using the solid linestyleaxs[0,0].plot(x, y, linestyle = 'solid')axs[0,0].set_title('solid' )# using the dashed linestyleaxs[0,1].plot(x, y, linestyle = 'dashed')axs[0,1].set_title('dashed' )# using the dashdot linestyleaxs[1,0].plot(x, y, linestyle = 'dashdot')axs[1,0].set_title('dash dot' )# using the dotted linestyleaxs[1,1].plot(x, y, linestyle = 'dotted')axs[1,1].set_title('dotted' )plt.tight_layout()plt.show()
The following is a code snippet using the ls argument:
import matplotlib.pyplot as pltx = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]y = [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]fig,axs = plt.subplots(2,2)# using the solid linestyleaxs[0,0].plot(x, y, ls = '-')axs[0,0].set_title('solid' )# using the dashed linestyleaxs[0,1].plot(x, y, ls = '--')axs[0,1].set_title('dashed' )# using the dashdot linestyleaxs[1,0].plot(x, y, ls = '-.')axs[1,0].set_title('dash dot' )# using the dotted linestyleaxs[1,1].plot(x, y, ls = ':')axs[1,1].set_title('dotted' )plt.tight_layout()plt.show()
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