How do you make an errorbar plot in matplotlib using linestyle=None in rcParams?

Question

When plotting errorbar plots, matplotlib is not following the rcParams of no linestyle. Instead, it\'s plotting all of the points connected with a line. Here\'s a minimum

Answer 1

This is a "bug" in older versions of matplotlib (and has been fixed for the 1.4 series). The issue is that in Axes.errorbar there is a default value of '-' for fmt, which is then passed to the call to plot which is used to draw the markers and line. Because a format string is passed into plot in never looks at the default value in rcparams.

You can also pass in fmt = ''

eb = plt.errorbar(x, y, yerr=.1, fmt='', color='b')

which will cause the rcParam['lines.linestlye'] value to be respected. I have submitted a PRto implement this.

Another work around for this is to make the errorbar in two steps:

l0, = plt.plot(x,y, marker='o', color='b')
eb = plt.errorbar(x, y, yerr=.1, fmt=None, color='b')

This is an annoying design decision, but changing it would be a major api break. Please open an issue on github about this.

errorbar doc.

As a side note, it looks like the call signature was last changed in 2007, and that was to make errorbars not default to blue.