I'm calling scatter inside a loop and want each plot in a different color.
Based on that, and on your answer: It seems to me that you actually want n distinct colors for your datasets; you want to map the integer indices 0, 1, ..., n-1 to distinct RGB colors. Something like:
Here is the function to do it:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
def get_cmap(n, name='hsv'):
'''Returns a function that maps each index in 0, 1, ..., n-1 to a distinct
RGB color; the keyword argument name must be a standard mpl colormap name.'''
return plt.cm.get_cmap(name, n)
Usage in your pseudo-code snippet in the question:
cmap = get_cmap(len(data))
for i, (X, Y) in enumerate(data):
scatter(X, Y, c=cmap(i))
I generated the figure in my answer with the following code:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
def get_cmap(n, name='hsv'):
'''Returns a function that maps each index in 0, 1, ..., n-1 to a distinct
RGB color; the keyword argument name must be a standard mpl colormap name.'''
return plt.cm.get_cmap(name, n)
def main():
N = 30
fig=plt.figure()
ax=fig.add_subplot(111)
plt.axis('scaled')
ax.set_xlim([ 0, N])
ax.set_ylim([-0.5, 0.5])
cmap = get_cmap(N)
for i in range(N):
rect = plt.Rectangle((i, -0.5), 1, 1, facecolor=cmap(i))
ax.add_artist(rect)
ax.set_yticks([])
plt.show()
if __name__=='__main__':
main()
Tested with both Python 2.7 & matplotlib 1.5, and with Python 3.5 & matplotlib 2.0. It works as expected.