Plot continuous line using 'dashes' argument in matplotlib's plot()

Question

I'm plotting several lines within a for block and I set the style of each line using matplotlib's dashes argument.

One (or more) of those lines needs to be continuous. I've found no way to draw such a line other than making a single extremely long dash, as seen in the MCVE below. This works, but feels rather hackish.

Is there a more "correct" way to achieve this?

(I know I can just use plt.plot() with no dashesargument to produce a continuous plot, but I need to produce a lot of custom styled lines, mixed with one or more continuos lines)

MCVE:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np


col = ['c', 'm', 'g', 'y', 'k']
c_dash = [[8, 4], [8, 4, 2, 4], [2, 2], [8, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4], [1000, 1]]

for i in range(5):
    x, y = range(10), np.random.uniform(0., 10., 10)
    plt.plot(x, y, color=col[i], dashes=c_dash[i])

plt.savefig('test.png', dpi=300)

Basically, yes. If you try it, you'll see the dashes argument does not accept '-'. — Gabriel
– Gabriel, Commented May 20, 2016 at 22:36
Still kind of hacky, but substituting 1000 with np.inf seems to work. — lanery
– lanery, Commented May 20, 2016 at 22:39

BHawk · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-20 23:19:35Z

2

If you change your c_dash list to include an offset param ( offset,( on,off sequence ) ) you can then use linestyle as your kwarg instead of dashes. This will allow you to use the linestyle keywords ‘solid’ | ‘dashed’, ‘dashdot’, ‘dotted’ in addition to your custom dashes.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np


col = ['c', 'm', 'g', 'y', 'k']
c_dash = [[0,[8, 4]], [0,[8, 4, 2, 4]], 'solid', [0,[8, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4]], 'solid']


for i in range(5):
    x, y = range(10), np.random.uniform(0., 10., 10)
    plt.plot(x, y, color=col[i], linestyle=c_dash[i])

edited May 20, 2016 at 23:19

answered May 20, 2016 at 23:04

BHawk

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1 Comment

Gabriel Over a year ago

That's a nice answer, I wasn't aware of the offset param. Thanks BHawk!

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