Matplotlib - plot_surface : get the x,y,z values written in the bottom right corner

Question

I am a quite new user of matplotlib. When plotting a surface (3D) with matplotlib and plot_surface, a window appears with the graph. In that windows, on the bottom right corner there is the coordinates of the actual position of the mouse. Is is possible to gain access to these values ?

I have search on internet but very few solutions are proposed. For a 2D plot, these values are accessible using a tkinter.canvas but in 3D, when using the same technique the event.xdata and event.ydata did not return the good position for the mouse.

Thank you in advance for your precious help,

Antoine

Answer 1

With ax.format_coord(mouseevent.xdata,mouseevent.ydata) you get the x, y, z values in a string ('x=0.222, y=0.452, z=0.826') from which you can extract the values.

For example for y-coordinate:

def gety(x,y):
    s = ax.format_coord(x,y)
    out = ""
    for i in range(s.find('y')+2,s.find('z')-2):
        out = out+s[i]
    return float(out)