Plot only on continent in matplotlib

Question

I am drawing a map using basemap from matplotlib. The data are spreaded all over the world, but I just want to retain all the data on the continent and drop those on the oce

Answer 1

The HYRY's answer won't work on new versions of matplotlib (nxutils is deprecated). I've made a new version that works:

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.path import Path
import numpy as np

map = Basemap(projection='cyl', resolution='c')

lons = [0., 0., 16., 76.]
lats = [0., 41., 19., 51.]

x, y = map(lons, lats)

locations = np.c_[x, y]

polygons = [Path(p.boundary) for p in map.landpolygons]

result = np.zeros(len(locations), dtype=bool) 

for polygon in polygons:

    result += np.array(polygon.contains_points(locations))

print result