Python: matplotlib - loop, clear and show different plots over the same figure

Question

I want to see how a plot varies with different values using a loop. I want to see it on the same plot. But i do not want to remains of the previous plot in the figure. In MA

Answer 1

There are essentially two different ways to create animations in matplotlib

interactive mode

Turning on interactive more is done using plt.ion(). This will create a plot even though show has not yet been called. The plot can be updated by calling plt.draw() or for an animation, plt.pause().

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [1,1]
y = [1,2]

fig, (ax1,ax2) = plt.subplots(nrows=2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
line1, = ax1.plot(x)
line2, = ax2.plot(y)
ax1.set_xlim(-1,17)
ax1.set_ylim(-400,3000)
plt.ion()

for i in range(15):
    x.append(x[-1]+x[-2])
    line1.set_data(range(len(x)), x)
    y.append(y[-1]+y[-2])
    line2.set_data(range(len(y)), y)

    plt.pause(0.1)

plt.ioff()    
plt.show()

FuncAnimation

Matplotlib provides an animation submodule, which simplifies creating animations and also allows to easily save them. The same as above, using FuncAnimation would look like:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation

x = [1,1]
y = [1,2]

fig, (ax1,ax2) = plt.subplots(nrows=2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
line1, = ax1.plot(x)
line2, = ax2.plot(y)
ax1.set_xlim(-1,18)
ax1.set_ylim(-400,3000)


def update(i):
    x.append(x[-1]+x[-2])
    line1.set_data(range(len(x)), x)
    y.append(y[-1]+y[-2])
    line2.set_data(range(len(y)), y)

ani = matplotlib.animation.FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=14, repeat=False)   
plt.show()

An example to animate a sine wave with changing frequency and its power spectrum would be the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation
import numpy as np

x = np.linspace(0,24*np.pi,512)
y = np.sin(x)

def fft(x):
    fft = np.abs(np.fft.rfft(x))
    return fft**2/(fft**2).max()

fig, (ax1,ax2) = plt.subplots(nrows=2)
line1, = ax1.plot(x,y)
line2, = ax2.plot(fft(y))
ax2.set_xlim(0,50)
ax2.set_ylim(0,1)

def update(i):
    y = np.sin((i+1)/30.*x)
    line1.set_data(x,y)
    y2 = fft(y)
    line2.set_data(range(len(y2)), y2)

ani = matplotlib.animation.FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=60, repeat=True)  
plt.show()