Save plot to image file instead of displaying it using Matplotlib

Question

I am writing a quick-and-dirty script to generate plots on the fly. I am using the code below (from Matplotlib documentation) as a starting point:

from pylab         


        

Answer 1

I used the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

p1 = plt.plot(dates, temp, 'r-', label="Temperature (celsius)")  
p2 = plt.plot(dates, psal, 'b-', label="Salinity (psu)")  
plt.legend(loc='upper center', numpoints=1, bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, -0.05),        ncol=2, fancybox=True, shadow=True)

plt.savefig('data.png')  
plt.show()  
f.close()
plt.close()

I found very important to use plt.show after saving the figure, otherwise it won't work.figure exported in png