API Reference

Matplotlib interfaces

Matplotlib has two interfaces. See Matplotlib Application Interfaces (APIs) for a more detailed description of both and their recommended use cases.

Axes interface (object-based, explicit)

create a Figure and one or more Axes objects, then explicitly use methods on these objects to add data, configure limits, set labels etc.

API:

subplots: create Figure and Axes
axes: add data, limits, labels etc.
Figure: for figure-level methods

Example:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)
ax.set_title("Sample plot")
plt.show()

pyplot interface (function-based, implicit)

consists of functions in the pyplot module. Figure and Axes are manipulated through these functions and are only implicitly present in the background.

API:

matplotlib.pyplot

Example:

plt.plot(x, y)
plt.title("Sample plot")
plt.show()

Modules

Alphabetical list of modules: