Question

I have been trying to pass a pyplot Figure out of an external class (as in must be imported), but have been unsuccessful. I don’t even know if this is the way I should be tackling the problem of getting a plot (un-shown) out of a class.

from matplotlib.figure import Figure
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

class Plotter(object):
    def __init__(self, xval=None, yval=None):
        self.xval = xval
        self.yval = yval

    def plotthing(self):
        f = Figure(1)
        sp = f.add_subplot(111)
        sp.plot(self.xval, self.yval, 'o-')
        return f

So that is the class roughly (names plotfile.py). Here is the bulk other script.

from plotfile import Plotter
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

app = Plotter(xval=range(0,10), yval=range(0,10))
plot = app.plotthing()
app.show(plot)

I have tried several variations on this theme and have tried my best googlefu, but not no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If I am way off on my approach to this I am very open to hearing how to do it correctly. Thanks.

Answer 1

A few points: I don’t think Figure works like like you think it does, and your Plotter object doesn’t have a .show() method, so app.show(plot) won’t work. The following worked for me:

---

# plotfile.py
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

class Plotter(object):
    def __init__(self, xval=None, yval=None):
        self.xval = xval
        self.yval = yval

    def plotthing(self):
        f = plt.figure()
        sp = f.add_subplot(111)
        sp.plot(self.xval, self.yval, 'o-')
        return f

---

from plotfile import Plotter

app = Plotter(xval=range(0,10), yval=range(0,10))
plot = app.plotthing()
plot.show()
raw_input()

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