Pyplot tutorial

An introduction to the pyplot interface. Please also see Quick start guide for an overview of how Matplotlib works and Matplotlib Application Interfaces (APIs) for an explanation of the trade-offs between the supported user APIs.

Introduction to pyplot

matplotlib.pyplot is a collection of functions that make matplotlib work like MATLAB. Each pyplot function makes some change to a figure: e.g., creates a figure, creates a plotting area in a figure, plots some lines in a plotting area, decorates the plot with labels, etc.

In matplotlib.pyplot various states are preserved across function calls, so that it keeps track of things like the current figure and plotting area, and the plotting functions are directed to the current Axes (please note that we use uppercase Axes to refer to the Axes concept, which is a central part of a figure and not only the plural of axis).

Note

The implicit pyplot API is generally less verbose but also not as flexible as the explicit API. Most of the function calls you see here can also be called as methods from an Axes object. We recommend browsing the tutorials and examples to see how this works. See Matplotlib Application Interfaces (APIs) for an explanation of the trade-off of the supported user APIs.

Generating visualizations with pyplot is very quick:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot([1, 2, 3, 4])
plt.ylabel('some numbers')
plt.show()