Putting newline in matplotlib label with TeX in Python?

Question

How can I add a newline to a plot's label (e.g. xlabel or ylabel) in matplotlib? For example,

plt.bar([1, 2], [4, 5])
plt.xlabel("My x label")
plt.ylabel(r"My long label with $\Sigma_{C}$ math \n continues here") 

Ideally I'd like the y-labeled to be centered too. Is there a way to do this? It's important that the label have both TeX (enclosed in '$') and the newline.

Answer 1

You can have the best of both worlds: automatic "escaping" of LaTeX commands and newlines:

plt.ylabel(r"My long label with unescaped {\LaTeX} $\Sigma_{C}$ math"
           "\n"  # Newline: the backslash is interpreted as usual
           r"continues here with $\pi$")

(instead of using three lines, separating the strings by single spaces is another option).

In fact, Python automatically concatenates string literals that follow each other, and you can mix raw strings (r"…") and strings with character interpolation ("\n").