Plotting a Text File with Matplotlib and IPython

Posted in Software

Earlier I was converting a Scilab simulation into C and I had the code emit a load of text files containing the data because I didn’t want to do any plotting or UI stuff in C. But I still wanted to plot the data so I can quickly check everything’s working. I also wanted to do some post processing of the data too… well that’s Python really shines in my opinion. I fired up IPython and used Numpy and Matplotlib.

 import numpy as np
 import matplotlib.pyplot as pyplot
 pyplot.plot( np.loadtxt("data/somedatafile.dat") )
 pyplot.show()

Done! In four lines of code I have my plot. I love IPython, numpy and matplotlib, they allow you to get things done really fast. I also love that IPython even auto-completes file paths, so very handy :-).