How do I make bar plots automatically cycle across different colors?

Kit picture Kit · Aug 29, 2010 · Viewed 16.6k times · Source

In matplotlib, line plots color cycle automatically. These two line plots would have different colors.

axes.plot(x1, y)
axes.plot(x2, y)

However, bar plots don't. Both these data series will have blue bars.

axes.bar(x1, y)
axes.bar(x2, y)

How do I make bar plots cycle automatically across a predefined set of colors?

Answer

ev-br picture ev-br · Aug 29, 2010

Would something along these lines do it for you?

#!/usr/bin/python 
from matplotlib import cm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#data
x=[1,2,4]
y=[11,12,8]

for i in range(0,len(x)):
  plt.bar(x[i],y[i],color=cm.jet(1.*i/len(x)))

plt.show()

More on colormaps.

EDIT: See this example for how to cycle over a predefined set of colors.