Plot from two files with errorbars for Gnuplot

Question

I am thinking which way to do the addition of errorbars better by thinking the format of data. The standard way of adding errors bars is discussed here, for instance.

Answer 1

Gnuplot 5 supports that you specify several characters as data file separators.

So, if you are sure you'll never get negative values (which I hopen given the format of your data), then you can use your original data file and set both white space and hyphen as datafile separator:

set datafile separator " -"
plot for [i=2:6:2] "data" using 1:(0.5*(column(i)+column(i+1))):(0.5*(column(i+1)-column(i))) with yerrorlines