typeerror in basic example for legend handles in matplotlib

Question

I have difficulties to understand the legend handling. The more, the basic example from the official matplotlib legend guide

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt         


        

Answer 1

I had the same error some while back, but the fixes suggested above didn't work for me. I updated my version of matplotlib as well, but this didn't help.

What did work was removing the handles argument and which plots to label altogether in the legend() method; like this:

    plot1 = plt.plot([1,2,3], 'b', label = 'first plot')
    plot2 = plt.plot([3,2,1], 'r', label = 'second plot')
    plt.legend()
    plt.show()

Which rendered nicely to this: