### Navigation

- index
- modules |
- home|
- examples|
- tutorials|
- pyplot|
- docs »

# Easily creating subplots

In early versions of matplotlib, if you wanted to use the pythonic API and create a figure instance and from that create a grid of subplots, possibly with shared axes, it involved a fair amount of boilerplate code. e.g.

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    import numpy as np

    x = np.random.randn(50)

    # old style
    fig = plt.figure()
    ax1 = fig.add_subplot(221)
    ax2 = fig.add_subplot(222, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)
    ax3 = fig.add_subplot(223, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)
    ax3 = fig.add_subplot(224, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)

Fernando Perez has provided a nice top level method to create in `subplots()` (note the “s” at the end) everything at once, and turn on x and y sharing for the whole bunch. You can either unpack the axes individually:

    .. code-block:: python

> # new style method 1; unpack the axes fig, ((ax1, ax2), (ax3, ax4)) = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True) ax1.plot(x)

or get them back as a numrows x numcolumns object array which supports numpy indexing

    # new style method 2; use an axes array
    fig, axs = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
    axs[0, 0].plot(x)

Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 0.373 seconds)

Generated by Sphinx-Gallery