Plotting a histogram using a csv file

Question

I have a csv file with the following format.

Label 1, 20
Label 2, 10
Label 3, 30
.
.
.
LabelN, 5

How do I plot the second column using the labels given in the csv file as labels on the x-axis?

(Something like this, where 1891-1900 is a label)

EDIT:

Found these questions which are quite similar to mine,

After trying the commands given in answer 1.

set xtics border in scale 1,0.5 nomirror rotate by -90 offset character 0, 0, 0
plot "data.txt" using 2:xticlabels(1) with histogram

I'm getting a not so clean histogram because the number of labels is quite large. I've tried the formatting given in answer 2. Can anyone suggest a way to get a cleaner histogram?

You can : 1) Plot only the important labels (extremes, mean etc. for example) 2) Skip every 5th label or so if labels form a series 3) Split your graph if you must plot every single label. Can you post a sample of the original file? — Aman
– Aman, Commented Dec 21, 2014 at 15:50
@axiom, I think I'll split the graph as there are so many labels. — Vinayak Mehta
– Vinayak Mehta, Commented Dec 21, 2014 at 16:01
Skipping some labels and plotting with appropriate font size gives this. — Aman
– Aman, Commented Dec 21, 2014 at 16:46

Aman · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-23 13:31:47Z

1

You have several options:

Plot only the important labels (extremes, mean etc. for example)
Skip every 5th label or so if labels form a series
Split your graph if you must plot every single label.

Seems like case 2) applies here, and thus skipping some of the labels before plotting will make the plot look better.

You can pre-process the file to skip every 5th label (say) using something like the following script:

line_number = 0
for line in open("d1.txt", "r"):
    line_split = line.split(",")
    if(line_number % 5 == 0):
        print line,
    else:
        print ",",line_split[1],
    line_number += 1

You can now plot with appropriate font size

set xtics border in scale 1,0.5 nomirror rotate by -90 offset character 0, 0, 0
set xtics font ",9"
plot "d2.txt" using 2:xticlabels(1) with histogram title "legend_here"

enter image description here

answered Dec 23, 2014 at 13:31

Aman

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