How Do You Make An Errorbar Plot In Matplotlib Using Linestyle=none In Rcparams?

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 working e

Solution 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.

Solution 2:

Using: fmt='' indeed doesn't work. One needs to put something that is not an empty string. As mentioned by @strpeter, a dot or any other marker would work. Examples: fmt='.'fmt=' 'fmt='o'