Plot lines and/or markers to the Axes. args is a variable length argument, allowing for multiple x, y pairs with an optional format string. For example, each of the following is legal:

plot(x, y)         # plot x and y using default line style and color
plot
 
(x, y, 'bo')   # plot x and y using blue circle markers
plot(y)            # plot y using x as index array 0..N-1
plot(y, 'r+')      # ditto, but with red plusses

If x and/or y is 2-dimensional, then the corresponding columns will be plotted.

An arbitrary number of x, y, fmt groups can be specified, as in:

a.plot(x1, y1, 'g^', x2, y2, 'g-')

Return value is a list of lines that were added.

By default, each line is assigned a different color specified by a ‘color cycle’. To change this behavior, you can edit the axes.color_cycle rcParam. Alternatively, you can use set_default_color_cycle().

The following format string characters are accepted to control the line style or marker:

The following color abbreviations are supported:

In addition, you can specify colors in many weird and wonderful ways, including full names ('green'), hex strings ('#008000'), RGB or RGBA tuples ((0,1,0,1)) or grayscale intensities as a string ('0.8'). Of these, the string specifications can be used in place of a fmt group, but the tuple forms can be used only as kwargs.

Line styles and colors are combined in a single format string, as in 'bo' for blue circles.

The kwargs can be used to set line properties (any property that has a set_* method). You can use this to set a line label (for auto legends), linewidth, anitialising, marker face color, etc. Here is an example:

plot([1,2,3], [1,2,3], 'go-', label='line 1', linewidth=2)
plot([1,2,3], [1,4,9], 'rs',  label='line 2')
axis([0, 4, 0, 10])
legend()

If you make multiple lines with one plot command, the kwargs apply to all those lines, e.g.:

plot(x1, y1, x2, y2, antialised=False)

Neither line will be antialiased.

You do not need to use format strings, which are just abbreviations. All of the line properties can be controlled by keyword arguments. For example, you can set the color, marker, linestyle, and markercolor with:

plot(x, y, color='green', linestyle='dashed', marker='o',
     markerfacecolor='blue', markersize=12).

See Line2D for details.

The kwargs are Line2D properties:

Property	Description
alpha	float (0.0 transparent through 1.0 opaque)
[True | False]
axes	an Axes instance
[True | False]
color or c	any matplotlib color
a callable function
[‘butt’ | ‘round’ | ‘projecting’]
[‘miter’ | ‘round’ | ‘bevel’]
sequence of on/off ink in points
data	2D array (rows are x, y) or two 1D arrays
[ ‘default’ | ‘steps’ | ‘steps-pre’ | ‘steps-mid’ | ‘steps-post’ ]
[‘full’ | ‘left’ | ‘right’ | ‘bottom’ | ‘top’ | ‘none’]
gid	an id string
label	string or anything printable with ‘%s’ conversion.
[ '-' | '--' | '-.' | ':' | 'None' | ' ' | '' ] and any drawstyle in combination with a linestyle, e.g. 'steps--'.
float value in points
lod	[True | False]
[ 7 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 'o' | 'D' | 'h' | 'H' | '_' | '' | 'None' | ' ' | None | '8' | 'p' | ',' | '+' | '.' | 's' | '*' | 'd' | 3 |0 | 1 | 2 | '1' | '3' | '4' | '2' | 'v' | '<' | '>' | '^' | '|' | 'x' | '$...$' | tuple | Nx2 array ]
any matplotlib color
float value in points
any matplotlib color
None | integer | (startind, stride)
float distance in points or callable pick function fn(artist, event)
float distance in points
[True | False | None]
snap	unknown
[‘butt’ | ‘round’ | ‘projecting’]
[‘miter’ | ‘round’ | ‘bevel’]
url	a url string
[True | False]
xdata	1D array
ydata	1D array
any number

kwargs scalex and scaley, if defined, are passed on to autoscale_view() to determine whether the x and y axes are autoscaled; the default is True.

Additional kwargs: hold = [True|False] overrides default hold state