How to pick a new color for each plotted line within a figure in matplotlib

Question

I d like to NOT specify a color for each plotted line  and have each line get a distinct color  But if I run   from matplotlib import pyplot as plt for i in range 20       plt plot  0  1    i  i    plt show     then I get this output     If you look at the image above  you can see that matplotlib attempts to pick colors for each line that are different  but eventually it re-uses colors - the top ten lines use the same colors as the bottom ten  I just want to stop it from repeating already used colors AND OR feed it a list of colors to use

User · Answer

I don t know if you can automatically change the color  but you could exploit your loop to generate different colors   for i in range 20      ax1 plot x  y  color    0  i   20 0  0  1    In this case  colors will vary from black to 100  green  but you can tune it if you want   See the matplotlib plot   docs and look for the color keyword argument   If you want to feed a list of colors  just make sure that you have a list big enough and then use the index of the loop to select the color  colors     r    b          w    for i in range 20      ax1 plot x  y  color   colors i

User · Answer

As Ciro s answer notes  you can use prop cycle to set a list of colors for matplotlib to cycle through  But how many colors  What if you want to use the same color cycle for lots of plots  with different numbers of lines   One tactic would be to use a formula like the one from https   gamedev stackexchange com a 46469 22397  to generate an infinite sequence of colors where each color tries to be significantly different from all those that preceded it   Unfortunately  prop cycle won t accept infinite sequences - it will hang forever if you pass it one  But we can take  say  the first 1000 colors generated from such a sequence  and set it as the color cycle  That way  for plots with any sane number of lines  you should get distinguishable colors   Example   from matplotlib import pyplot as plt from matplotlib colors import hsv to rgb from cycler import cycler    1000 distinct colors  colors    hsv to rgb   i   0 618033988749895    1 0  1  1             for i in range 1000   plt rc  axes   prop cycle  cycler  color   colors     for i in range 20       plt plot  1  0    i  i    plt show     Output     Now  all the colors are different - although I admit that I struggle to distinguish a few of them

User · Answer

You can use a predefined  qualitative colormap  like this   from matplotlib cm import get cmap  name    Accent  cmap   get cmap name     type  matplotlib colors ListedColormap colors   cmap colors    type  list axes set prop cycle color colors    Tested on matplotlib 3 0 3  See https   github com matplotlib matplotlib issues 10840 for discussion on why you can t call axes set prop cycle color cmap    A list of predefined qualititative colormaps is available at https   matplotlib org gallery color colormap reference html

User · Answer

prop cycle  color cycle was deprecated in 1 5 in favor of this generalization  http   matplotlib org users whats new html added-axes-prop-cycle-key-to-rcparams    cycler is a separate package extracted from matplotlib  from cycler import cycler import matplotlib pyplot as plt  plt rc  axes   prop cycle  cycler  color     r    g    b      plt plot  1  2   plt plot  2  3   plt plot  3  4   plt plot  4  5   plt plot  5  6   plt show       Also shown in the  now badly named  example  http   matplotlib org 1 5 1 examples color color cycle demo html mentioned at  https   stackoverflow com a 4971431 895245   Tested in matplotlib 1 5 1

User · Answer

I usually use the second one of these   from matplotlib pyplot import cm import numpy as np   variable n below should be number of curves to plot   version 1   color cm rainbow np linspace 0 1 n   for i c in zip range n  color      plt plot x  y c c    or version 2   color iter cm rainbow np linspace 0 1 n    for i in range n      c next color     plt plot x  y c c    Example of 2

User · Answer

matplotlib 1 5   You can use axes set prop cycle  example    matplotlib 1 0-1 4  You can use axes set color cycle  example    matplotlib 0 x  You can use Axes set default color cycle

User · Answer

You can also change the default color cycle in your matplotlibrc file  If you don t know where that file is  do the following in python   import matplotlib matplotlib matplotlib fname     This will show you the path to your currently used matplotlibrc file  In that file you will find amongst many other settings also the one for axes color cycle  Just put in your desired sequence of colors and you will find it in every plot you make  Note that you can also use all valid html color names in matplotlib

[matplotlib] How to pick a new color for each plotted line within a figure in matplotlib?

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