A line chart can be created using the Matplotlib plot() function. While we can just plot a line, we are not limited to that. We can explicitly define the grid, the x and y axis scale and labels, title and display options.

Line chart example The example below will create a line chart.

from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = sin(2.5*pi*t)
plot(t, s)
xlabel('time (s)')
ylabel('voltage (mV)')
title('Sine Wave')
grid(True)
show()

Want more practice on this without setting anything up? PyChallenge has graded plotting exercises that run in the browser, and the error message tells you what went wrong. Output:

Python Matplotlib Line Chart

The lines:

from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = sin(2.5*pi*t)

simply define the data to be plotted.

from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = sin(2.5*pi*t)
plot(t, s)
show()

plots the chart.  The other statements are very straightforward: statements xlabel() sets the x-axis text, ylabel() sets the y-axis text, title() sets the chart title and grid(True) simply turns on the grid.

If you want to save the plot to the disk, call the statement:

savefig("line_chart.png")

Plot a custom Line Chart

If you want to plot using an array (list), you can execute this script:

from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 20.0, 1)
s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
plot(t, s)
xlabel('Item (s)')
ylabel('Value')
title('Python Line Chart: Plotting numbers')
grid(True)
show()

The statement:

t = arange(0.0, 20.0, 1)

defines start from 0, plot 20 items (length of our array) with steps of 1.

Output:

Python Line Chart from List

Multiple plots

If you want to plot multiple lines in one chart, simply call the plot() function multiple times. An example:

from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 20.0, 1)
s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
s2 = [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
plot(t, s)
plot(t, s2)
xlabel('Item (s)')
ylabel('Value')
title('Python Line Chart: Plotting numbers')
grid(True)
show()

Output:

python line chart multiple

In case you want to plot them in different views in the same window you can use this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pylab import *
t = arange(0.0, 20.0, 1)
s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
s2 = [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
plt.subplot(2, 1, 1)
plt.plot(t, s)
plt.ylabel('Value')
plt.title('First chart')
plt.grid(True)
plt.subplot(2, 1, 2)
plt.plot(t, s2)
plt.xlabel('Item (s)')
plt.ylabel('Value')
plt.title('Second chart')
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()

Output:

Python subplots

The plt.subplot() statement is key here. The subplot() command specifies numrows, numcols and fignum.

Styling the plot If you want thick lines or set the color, use:

plot(t, s, color="red", linewidth=2.5, linestyle="-")